Hakes wrote on his Facebook page: “I can no longer sing at my Grandma’s funeral, because I attended a gay pride rally and a picture was posted publicly (years ago). The priest’s reasoning is by attending such event, I am opposing the Catholic Church’s fundamental marriage belief.

"Both my Grandma and Grandpa would be disgusted by their parish. Their compassion and empathy was abundant, no matter who you were. They saw beyond race, religion, sexuality, and social class. They loved everyone. That is what is means to be a Christian. That is what it means to be Catholic. Please SHARE!”

The hard line letter from father Lengerich lists the main reasons why Hakes was banned from singing at his grandmother’s funeral mass, outlining that “the Catholic Church forbids those who openly defy tenants of our faith to serve in (any official church capacity). This included people who have been divorced or remarried (with the benefit of a declaration of annuity), have openly supported abortion rights and are openly participating in unchaste same-sex relationships.”

Although the Church affirms the dignity of gay people, it nevertheless finds their relationships impermissible, the letter adds.

“The Catholic Church upholds the dignity of those with same-sex attraction. At the same time, it does not permit same-sex relationships or openly advocating for them because it causes a scandal…”

Hakes, who has sung for the church on several previous occasions, said his grandmother lived near the church and her family had been a member of the parish for generations.

On Tuesday St. Mary’s Parish issued the following statement:

“Having become aware of the painful situation at Saint Mary’s Parish in Decatur, the diocese is working on fostering healing and reconciliation between the pastor and the Hakes family. We encourage all to move forward with genuine Christian love and mercy and with respect and prayer for one another.”

Hakes and his family have also reportedly filed a formal complaint with leaders of the Diocese and are planning to meet with the leaders.

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2016-11-30T05:20:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/reading-a-man-s-character-through-his-enemies-take-donald-trumpReading a man’s character through his enemies - take Donald Trump2016-11-29T04:17:46-05:00
They say if you want to get the measure of a man, have a look at who his friends are. That may be true, but you’ll gain a much faster insight about him if you consider his enemies. What we now know for certain about Donald Trump is that, like the paranoid and mistrustful Richard Nixon, he keeps a very long list of them. That list now includes celebrities, former associates, politicians and journalists. It’s also growing by the day. Before he even becomes president, Trump’s been making increasingly dramatic threats and lashing out in public and private, in meetings and on Twitter, giving us a worrying preview of what his vindictive administration will be like when it commences.

But it’s not just that he’s already behaving like a tyrant. It’s who he’s behaving like a tyrant toward that tells us something fundamental about him.

Last Monday morning he summoned the nation’s leading news anchors to his gold plated tower. Thinking they would hear new details about what kind of access to him they would have, they attended. Into the tower came Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos, Wolf Blitzer and others for an off-the-record chat and presumably to discuss the lessons of the hard fought presidential campaign. But what they actually got was a defiant slap in the face and this message: You got it all wrong.

The meeting took place in a big boardroom and there were about 30 or 40 people present, including the top news anchors from all the networks, the New York Post reported.

Trump started in on CNN chief Jeff Zucker first telling him, “I hate your network. Everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.” He had barbs for everyone present and he held nothing back.

“We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong,” he continued.

What Trump fails to realize is that he’s no longer a private citizen and he’s certainly not a monarch: he’s the incoming President of the United States. If he can’t handle the constant media criticism then he’s applied for the wrong job.

Meanwhile, it may have escaped your attention but Trump’s most impassioned supporters are what some outlets call the “alt-right.” Your Yankee grandfather’s generation would have simply called them fascists. Trump’s profoundly anti-immigrant campaign inspired the alt-right, our own homegrown fascists, to pick him as their savior. The frequent slurs against people from Mexico and the proposal to ban Muslims from the U.S. ensured the enthusiastic support he has received from white supremacists – a fact that he has done practically nothing to change.

Since his win an alarming number of bias attacks against minorities have occurred across the country, including attacks on immigrants, LGBT people, and damage to private property, vandalized with neo-Nazi graffiti extolling Hitler and Trump.

Did Trump lament these developments? He did not. Instead he attacked the cast of a Broadway musical for respectfully asking his vice president Mike Pence to work on behalf of all Americans and uphold their inalienable rights.

Trump takes no offense at the verbal and physical attacks made in his name, but he was enraged by a polite request made by a multiracial group of actors on a Broadway stage, and he demanded an apology from them.

The contrast is stark. Last weekend a group of white supremacists gathered in his name at the Ronald Reagan federal building, just a few blocks from the White House, to celebrate his election. Trump, who always attacks without holding back, had not one word to condemn them.

By choosing Steve Bannon, a man that some Democrats have already openly called a Nazi, to help direct his administration, Trump gave what some have called a wink to the alt-right, because Bannon has managed one of its most preferred media platforms and is overseeing its expansion.

So there is no question that we are in a dangerous and unprecedented new moment now. Trump apparently doesn’t understand the baleful forces he unleashed during the primaries or more worryingly he doesn't actually care. In Trumpland you either aid his ambitions or you find yourself berated and blacklisted.

One particularly warm relationship he appears to have is with the Russian president. In fact, reports show that before he spoke to the Pentagon he spoke to Vladimir Putin. On Monday Putin reciprocated by moving his nuclear missiles closer to Europe in an alarming show of force.

While Trump spends all of his time attacking his enemies on Twitter, he should be much more worried about his friends out there in the real world.

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2016-11-28T05:21:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/irish-cabinet-minister-slams-vice-prez-mike-pence-on-gay-remarksIrish cabinet minister slams Vice Prez Mike Pence on gay remarks2016-11-21T23:29:42-05:00
Ireland’s first openly gay cabinet minister, Leo Varadkar, has hit out at Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Speaking to Irish radio he said that while he’d like to see the incoming VP visit Ireland he “profoundly disagreed” with his past support for gay conversion therapy. Varadkar is currently favorite to replace Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny as head of Fine Gael when he retires.

Varadkar, who currently serves as Minister for Social Protection and is widely talked about as a future Taoiseach, told listeners of RTÉ’s "Marian Finucane" show, “I don’t like what Trump and Pence stand for, particularly on social issues. The right approach, I think, with anyone is to respect their religion, respect their values and engage with them. That’s how you win over minds and soften hearts.”

“When it comes to Mike Pence, I’d like him to come to Ireland. I’d personally like to meet him. I’d love to tell him my story but more importantly I’d love to tell him the story of our country. The country of his ancestors and how we went from being one of the most conservative countries in the world [to where we are now]. That’s the way to deal with things.”

The Indiana Governor is a proud Irish American; his grandfather, Richard Michael Cawley, emigrated from County Sligo in 1923 and his great-grandmother came Co. Clare.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny received much criticism on social media after calling Pence on Friday in order to discuss the undocumented Irish, and, following the call, tweeting, “He [Pence] certainly knows Ireland and the issues that matter to our people.”

Despite the Republican Party’s hard-line anti-immigration platform, many consider Pence a potential ally within the new administration who could help get a deal for the estimated 50,000 undocumented Irish citizens living in America. In 2009 he was one of the few Republicans to meet the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) while Congress was considering immigration reform, citing “April 11, 1923”, the date his grandfather landed at Ellis Island, as a reason.

Varadkar praised his boss’s diplomatic approach saying, “The most important thing to bear in mind is that the links that exist between Ireland and America are economic, they’re cultural, they’re family. Presidents and Vice Presidents, Taoisigh [Irish Prime Ministers] and ministers come and go but it’s very important that we maintain those links.”

He also weighed in on the controversy surrounding the VP-elect’s visit to see a Broadway show Friday, saying, “It was quite ugly. He was booed on his entrance, booed during the play but at the end what happened was something very beautiful in my view and very powerful; as he was about to leave the cast lined up on the stage and the main actor who actually played a Vice President, Vice President Burr.. he stood up and spoke to Mike Pence and he welcomed him, said he hoped he’d took something from it... and he expressed the concerns of some Americans that the new administration might not protect them and that it might undermine inalienable rights and freedoms that are so much part of America.

“And to me I felt that was the right approach, that's the approach we should have when we deal with the new administration.”

37-year-old Leo Varadkar studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin and was elected to the Dáil to represent the suburban constituency of Dublin West in 2007. Dubbed something of a rising star he was quickly promoted to the Fine Gael party’s frontbench where he was made its spokesman for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

When the party was returned to Government in 2011 he was made Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport in something of a shock move. He said at the time that while he knew, “a lot of facts...I don't play the sports."

He was later moved to the Department of Health and in the run up to Ireland’s referendum on same sex marriage in 2015 he came out publicly as a gay man, telling RTÉ, "it’s not something that defines me. I'm not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician or a gay politician for that matter. It’s just part of who I am, it doesn't define me, it is part of my character I suppose".

With Taoiseach Enda Kenny tipped to retire at some point within the next few years, Varadkar is the current favorite to succeed him; the Irish Times has described him as “leading the race” and in a poll last month the Sunday Independent 39% of voters backed him for the top job, 14 points higher than the number who supported his rumored rival Simon Coveney, the current Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government.

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2016-11-21T05:23:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/intransigent-arlene-foster-northern-ireland-s-first-minister-of-the-fewAnti-gay crusade of Arlene Foster, Northern Ireland’s First Minister2016-10-29T06:43:43-04:00
Gay rights have become an international benchmark that indicate whether or not you live in an open society. They signal how serious your government is about inclusion and democracy. They also send a strong message to the world about what kind of people you are striving to be.

Like a latter-day George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, Foster stood before the press and history this week, bitterly opposing every small advance being made by her own hard pressed LGBT constituents.

“We have an enormous amount of sympathy for the McArthur family," she said, omitting to show any to the gay group who - the Commission had ruled - had been discriminated against.

"We feel they (Ashers) have been through an absolutely horrific time - not helped I have to say by the actions of Equality Commission. I think the Equality Commission have not covered themselves in glory in fact I think it's quite troubling the way in which they have behaved in all of this."

Troubling? They did their job, which is to weigh the legal rights of all parties with recourse to the state’s equality laws, that is all.

It’s incomprehensible that a senior political leader of a modern state would lambast a nonpartisan commission for performing the task it has been created to administer, but here she was blasting “the metropolitan liberal elite definition of equality” like another frothing commentator on a Breitbart comments page.

The world took notice. Press reports immediately blasted her from Belfast to Sydney. Northern Ireland’s First Minister is well named because she fosters prejudice and division, the critics howled.

Further attacking her own Equality Commission Foster added: “I think they need to have a long hard look at how they work with faith communities in Northern Ireland… they need to look at what real equality is…”

But Foster’s anti-gay crusade was only getting warmed up. On Thursday she announced she will use a petition of concern (a measure designed to safeguard minority rights in Northern Ireland, not block them) to postpone any change to the law regarding LGBT marriage equality for the next five years.

Five years. That’s a long time to wait to have your full citizenship granted (the rest of the UK has already adopted it without incident of course).

That means it’ll be 2021 before LGBT people in Northern Ireland can even expect another discussion of the marriage legislation their neighbors in the UK and the Republic of Ireland already take for granted.

DUP plans to block gay marriage for the next 5 years in Northern Ireland, the only part of Ireland or UK without it https://t.co/jHTh4zOvwy

Laughably, Foster insisted that her party is not anti-gay, but this is the same Democratic Unionist Party that waged the notorious Save Ulster From Sodomy campaign. History contradicts her.

Part of her insuperable hostility to LGBT equality, Foster explained, is due to the "very, very vicious" online abuse she received from activists who are demanding a change in the law she told the press this week. Their actions made it less likely that the DUP would support such a move, she said.

"If activists want to have a conversation about where they are coming from, do they seriously think they are going to influence me by sending me abuse? No, they are not going to influence me by sending me abuse - in fact, they are going to send me in the opposite direction and people need to reflect on that."

In Foster’s world it is only other people who need to reflect on things, especially angry gay people, who have the audacity to repeatedly ask her for their rights.

Clearly Foster does not like the idea of equal marriage and thinks that is sufficient reason to block it, but as First Minister she is tasked with representing all the people of Northern Ireland, not just the people who vote for her.

Dismissing the legitimate concerns of her own LGBT constituency she high-handedly referred to them this week as a “sideshow” and a “storm in a teacup.”

Depressingly she also announced that she will not discuss the far-reaching changes that will be brought about by Brexit with her government colleagues in the Republic of Ireland this week because, she says, there is no need.

She has “better things to do” that debate the political and diplomatic tsunami that’s about to hit the relationship between the two states of the one small island and the EU.

This isn’t just contempt then, it’s an unconscionable direction of her duty. Foster has repeatedly demonstrated this week that she is simply out of her depth on the national stage.

Meanwhile it’s becoming clearer by the day that when it comes to her leadership style she prefers dictatorship to democracy. Call her Kim Jong Foster, she’s administrating Northern Ireland’s lamentable transition from open borders to a defensive fortress.

Pull up the drawbridge, man the borders, and march lockstep into the blinkered past having learned nothing.

Everyone else can take a good look at themselves, because Arlene has much "better things to do" than to acknowledge your rights or even your existence.

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2016-10-29T08:00:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/predictably-absurd-reactions-to-the-ashers-cake-court-case-in-northern-irelandPredictably absurd reactions to the Ashers cake court case in Northern Ireland2016-10-28T08:52:53-04:00The howls of protest from some quarters over the Ashers bakery ruling in Northern Ireland this week were as predictable as they were absurd.

A judge ruled on Monday that adding the word “gay” to a cake celebrating marriage had led the bakery to refuse the order, a clear breach of the equality law, which dictates that all customers be treated equally.

Ian O’Doherty, the Irish Independent’s conservative commentator, was inconsolable. He raced to Twitter to announce that the sky was falling. It’s PC run mad, he groused.

“One reader today said the views of people like Ashers should be ‘stamped out’ - we're entering a reign of tyranny if we're not careful,” O’Doherty tweeted, rather hysterically.

One reader today said the views of people like #Ashers should be 'stamped out' - we're entering a reign of tyranny if we're not careful

What does he think is going to happen? Are one hundred gay bakers armed with spatulas and cake decorating equipment coming to force him to paint rainbows on a Victoria sponge?

This is overheated nonsense, but O’Doherty was seeing jackboots. “We're witnessing an interesting cultural shift, people who demand that you respect them - or else. Then they wonder why they’re despised.”

We're witnessing an interesting cutural shift, people who demand that you respect them - or else. Then they wonder why they're despised

In fact, the only cultural shift we're witnessing is people like O’Doherty slowly realizing that his rights aren't superior to anyone else's. Boy, do the rest of us already know how that feels, so he might want to pull up a chair.

And frankly, gay people are often despised at the outset, then they're despised for speaking out, then they're despised for seeking justice. That’s kind of the modus operandi for an oppressed minority. He clearly just wants them to shut up and take it and gets triggered when they refuse.

Will O’Doherty and all those who lament the court’s ruling be sent to Ballymaloe Cookery School for their cultural re-education? Will it be a sort of night of the long spatulas? This is, what do you call it, specious nonsense.

Equal protection under the law protects everyone equally, gay people and everyone else. The terms are in the title. Ashers is still quite free to believe what they wish to believe. That hasn't changed. It’s simply against the law to deny goods or services. That's a good law. It’s there for a reason, and it protects people.

Can you really argue that a person’s sexuality is not at issue whilst you try to discriminate against them based on its expression? You cannot, as Ashers discovered for the second time outside court in Belfast on Monday.

“Absolute disgrace, it’s their beliefs, the (gay) couple should have just accepted that and took their business elsewhere,” tweeted one Catholic commenter. “And should his parents' generation have just accepted that Catholics were second class citizens in Northern Ireland and not agitated for their civil rights?” I asked him. “That’s different,” he replied, but in fact it’s not.

@utv absolute disgrace, it's their beliefs, the couple should of just accepted that and took their business elsewhere

The court did not accept the claim that to provide a cake to a paying gay customer would require Ashers to endorse or support gay marriage, which is contrary to their religious beliefs.

Many businesses supply t-shirts and banners with liberal or conservative political messaging, for example. No one believes they constitute the endorsement of the parent company.

Besides, Ashers regularly bake Halloween cakes with flying witches on broomsticks. No one thinks they're Satanists. They should at least try to be consistent.

And when it comes down to it, a majority of Christians on the island of Ireland have already voted for LGBT equality. So Ashers have lost the fig leaf that their actions are a result of their Christian beliefs. It's Ashers' own beliefs. Let’s be clear about that.

Ashers is perfectly entitled to believe that gay marriage is sinful, but they are a business and business services should be available to all paying customers, however constituted, the court has found. The law requires them to do just that.

Of course, Ashers has lamented today’s ruling, but critics reply that equality doesn't mean that Christians no longer have rights. It simply means they’re rights are not superior. It’s a bakery; it’s not a religious belief system. It exists to make wee cakes and buns, not pass divisive moral judgments on its paying customers.

When you open your doors to paying customers and you offer to bake decorated cakes you don’t get to say how some people celebrate love isn’t worthy.

How do you feel about the Ashers Bakery decision? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section, below.

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2016-10-26T05:00:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/why-is-ashers-bakery-v-gay-rights-advocate-court-case-is-a-big-dealWhy is Ashers bakery v Gay rights advocate court case is a big deal2016-10-28T08:52:53-04:00
Can you argue that a person’s sexuality is not the issue whilst you discriminate against them based on its expression?

You can not, as Ashers bakery discovered for the second time in court today.

The judge has ruled that the word ‘gay’ on the requested cake caused the refusal, which is in breach of the equality law. The equality law dictates that all people be treated equally under it.

The court did not accept the claim that to provide the cake would require Ashers to endorse, promote or support gay marriage which is contrary to their religious beliefs.

This claim was easy to refute. Many businesses supply t-shirts and banners with liberal and conservative political messaging, for example. No one believes they constitute the endorsement of the parent company.

Although Ashers believes that gay marriage is sinful, they are in a business and those services should be available to all paying customers, however constituted, the court has found. The law requires them to do just that.

In the original ruling against the bakery the judge ruled: “Ashers are not a religious organization; they are a bakery conducting a business for profit -and notwithstanding their religious beliefs, there are no exceptions under the 2006 Regulations which apply to the case and so the Legislature, after consultation and consideration, has determined what the law should be.”

The ruling continued: “It is wrong that in fulfilling the order the Defendants would be promoting and supporting a change in the law of Northern Ireland so as to enable same sex marriage in that they were doing no more than obeying the law and providing the Plaintiff with a service.”

“If the Plaintiff was a gay man who ran a bakery business and the Defendants as Christians wanted him to bake a cake with the words ‘support heterosexual marriage’ the Plaintiff would be required to do so as, otherwise he would, according to the law be discriminating against the Defendants. This is not a law which is for one belief only but is equal to and for all.”

Ashers has lamented today's ruling, but critics reply that equality doesn't mean Christians don't have rights. It simply means their rights are not superior.

Ashers is a bakery, not a religious belief system. It exists to make cakes, not pass moral judgements on its customers.

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2016-10-26T04:03:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/belfast-christian-bakers-lose-appeal-over-gay-marriage-cakeBelfast Christian bakers lose appeal over gay marriage cake2016-10-28T08:52:53-04:00The Christian Belfast bakers, who refused to create a wedding cake including a pro-gay marriage slogan, have lost their appeal against the court ruling that they were “unlawfully discriminated.” The outcome of their court case is said to have implications for the freedom of expression across the United Kingdom.

Daniel McArthur the manager of Ashers Bakery had declined an order placed by Garth Lee, in May 2014, claiming the message he had requested on the cake was inconsistent with their religious beliefs.

In 2015 the McArthurs were found to have breached the equality legislation, following a court case in Belfast. During the appeal, heard this May, it was claimed that the outcome would have implications for freedom of expression across the United Kingdom.

Lee, who ordered the cake, a member of the LGBT advocacy group Queer Space, had wanted a cake featuring the Sesame Street puppets Bert and Ernie with the phrase “Support Gay Marriage” for a private function to mark International Day Against Homophobia. He paid ($44.68) £36.50, the cost in full, for the cake at Ashers' Belfast city center branch. Two days later he was telephoned and told they could not fulfil his order.

Manager, McArthur, has maintained that Lee’s sexuality has never been an issue, rather the message he had wanted the bakery to create, “Support Gay Marriage.”

Before entering court on Monday McArthur said “This has never been about the customer. It has been about a message promoting a cause that contradicts the Bible.”

The three appeal judges were Northern Ireland’s lord chief justice, Sir Declan Morgan, and lord justices Weatherup and Weir. In delivering the appeal judgement Northern Ireland's Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan said Ashers had directly discriminated. The judge rejected the argument that the bakery would be endorsing the slogan by baking the cake.

He said “The fact that a baker provides a cake for a particular team or portrays witches on a Halloween cake does not indicate any support for either.”

During the 30-minute ruling Sir Morgan concluded that the original ruling had been correct and found that “as a matter of law” the bakery has “discriminated against the respondent directly on the grounds of sexual orientation contrary to the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2006.”

The Judge also criticized the Northern Ireland Equality Commission. Saying the publicly funded body should have offered the McArthur family advice during the case, as the bakers believed their rights as people of faith within the commercial sphere were being undermined.

As he left the court Lee embraced and shook hands with the reporters the Daily Mail reports. McArthur family members sat on the front bench of the public gallery as the court emptied.

A supporter of the McArthur family, Jim Well, told the Guardian newspaper the ruling was “an awful decision” and said an appeal would be mounted against the ruling at the supreme court in London.

Lee said “The only thing that I would like to say is I'm relieved and very grateful to the Court of Appeal for the judgment.”

The Northern Ireland director of the Evangelical Alliance Peter Lynas told Premier Christian Radio “We're saddened. This is a sad day for freedom of conscience and religions.

“Ashers have lost this case, but more importantly I think we've all lost some of our freedoms in this moment because they've been forced to promote a view they fundamentally disagree with, and that is the antithesis of a free and fair society, so it is deeply worrying this outcome.”

Director of the Rainbow Project John O’Doherty said: “Ashers Baking Company entered into a contractual agreement to make this cake and then changed their mind. Sympathetic as some may be to the position in which the company finds itself, this does not change the facts of the case. The judgment clearly articulated that this is direct discrimination for which there can be no justification.”

He added “We once again extend the hand of friendship to all people of faith, churches and families. We would encourage faith leaders to engage with our community to ensure better relations and to develop trust and respect between our overlapping communities for the betterment of our society.”

During the original court case last year District Judge Isobel Brownlie ruled that religious beliefs could not dictate the law and ordered the firm to pay damages of $611 (£500).

The bakery, Ashers, has six branches and employs 80 staff across the United Kingdom and Ireland. They have been supported by The Christian Institute, which organized public rallies and garnered financial backing for the court case. In turn Lee's case was taken in conjunction with the Northern Ireland Equality Commission.

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2016-10-25T04:22:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/oscar-wilde-among-thousands-pardoned-by-uk-gov-for-same-sex-relationshipsOscar Wilde among thousands pardoned by UK gov for same sex relationships2016-10-28T08:52:53-04:00Irish writer Oscar Wilde may be among thousands of gay and bisexual men pardoned posthumously for engaging in consensual same-sex relationships.

The famous playwright and author stands to have his criminal record wiped clean as part of a new initiative announced by the UK Department of Justice that will pardon those who were once convicted of sexual offenses that are no longer illegal. UK Justice Minister Sam Gyimah announced that a clause would be introduced to the policing and crime bill to allow for the pardon of some 59,000 deceased men found guilty of these now outdated crimes.

Consensual sexual acts between men over the age of 21 were not decriminalized in England and Wales until 1967, not being applied in Scotland until 1980 or Northern Ireland until 1982.

In a symbolic gesture, however, the Department announced Thursday that if a historical homosexual crime is no longer illegal in the UK and involved a consensual sexual act with another over the age of 16, the crime will now be deemed posthumously pardoned.

No individual case or name will be singled out, but Wilde’s is one of the best known. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor in Reading prison after his 1895 conviction for gross indecency. The evidence brought against him included that of him procuring male prostitutes.

“It is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of any crime today,” Gyimah said.

“Through pardons and the existing disregard process, we will meet our manifesto commitment to put right these wrongs.”

The announcement comes three years after famous English computer scientist Alan Turing was posthumously pardoned by the Queen for his conviction of gross indecency. Turing, who succeeded in breaking Nazi German codes during World War II, killed himself by taking cyanide in 1954 aged 41, two years after his gross indecency conviction which was related to homosexual acts.

In 2012, British Liberal Democratic politician Lord Sharkey moved to allow those convicted of the obsolete crimes who were still living to have their convictions disregarded. Up to 75,000 men had faced a gross indecency conviction until the laws were repealed. Sharkey’s amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 allowed the 16,000 still living the right to apply to have their convictions disregarded.

The new clause would follow on from Lord Sharkey’s amendment, whereas individual cases are reassessed for those still living, a blanket pardon will be implemented for those who died.

“This is a momentous day for thousands of families up and down the UK who have been campaigning on this issue for decades,” Sharkey said

“I am very grateful for the government’s support and the support of many of my colleagues in parliament.”

“We welcome the government announcement to issue a posthumous pardon to all gay and bi men unjustly prosecuted for being who they are, but we don’t think it goes far enough,” stated Paul Twocock, director of campaigns at Stonewall, a gay rights organization.

The organization would prefer a bill proposed by Scottish National Party MP Jack Nicholson, however, which will be debated in British parliament later this week.

“John Nicolson MP’s proposed bill closes a loophole that means some gay and bi men who are still alive and living with those convictions still can’t have them deleted, despite them being unjust and not illegal today. We urge the government to look at bringing this into their proposal,” continued Twocock.

The government has refused to support the bill with fears it will be used to pardon those who are still guilty of crimes such as sex with a minor and non-consensual sexual activity.

“We also don’t agree with the government’s interpretation of John Nicolson MP’s bill – it explicitly excludes pardoning anyone convicted of offenses that would still be illegal today, including non-consensual sex and sex with someone under 16,” Twocock said.

Just 15 weeks after the debut of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Oscar Wilde found himself in Reading Prison on charges of homosexual acts. The imprisonment was a massive turning point in his life and the culmination of a feud with his lover’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, whom he had sued for libel after the Marquess publicly accused him of sodomy. Confined to his cell for 23 hours a day, Wilde would live just three years after his release, dying from cerebral meningitis in November 1900 at 46 years of age.

Same-sex sexual activity was not decriminalized in the Republic of Ireland until 1993 after a 1988 ruling stated Irish laws prohibiting male homosexual activities were in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights.

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2016-10-20T14:00:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/she-helped-change-ireland-and-she-could-again-panti-bliss-for-presidentShe helped change Ireland and she could again, Panti Bliss for President2016-10-16T08:32:07-04:00
For years it was Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the haughty heroine created by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who was the exemplar of the Irish people, Ireland personified – but now I’d argue it’s a six foot three (in heels) drag queen called Panti Bliss.

The drag alter ego of Ballinrobe born Rory O’Neill, 47, Panti was at the forefront of the successful national campaign last year that saw Ireland become the first country in the world to legalize same sex marriage by a popular vote.

Just like Yeats and Gregory’s heroine, Panti also has “the walk of a queen,” but this queen isn’t asking our young people to give up their lives for Ireland.

Instead, by living openly and fearlessly, she’s been inspiring our LGBT sons and daughters to have the courage to do likewise for at least two decades, in a nation that deeply values their lives and contributions and took a national vote to say so.

And as Ireland’s unlikely social revolution (led by impassioned gay and straight young people) made headlines around the world, Panti has indisputably become its revolutionary figurehead, the male and female face of an era of great change.

She’s idolized around the world now, but increasingly she’s won a host of unlikely admirers nearer to home too.

There is talk, serious talk, about a potential run for the Irish presidency, a prospect that makes her howl with laughter but that seasoned campaigners believe has legs.

O’Neill understands where they’re coming from, but he resists their siren call.

“I suppose you would get two people for the price of one,” she laughs. “People mention a presidential run half jokingly to me and yet there was a time when our political parties were coming to me but I had no interest,” he tells IrishCentral.

“I jokingly have said I would be quite good with the Irish presidency because I make a decent speech and Panti poses pretty well for pictures.”

This is an understatement. Noted journalist Fintan O’Toole described Panti’s noble call speech in the Abbey Theatre, where she advocated for marriage equality to a cheering crowd, “the most eloquent Irish speech since Daniel O'Connell was in his prime.”

People who accidentally embody the zeitgeist (as O’Neill’s drag persona unarguably does) can be the last to interpret what their contribution means, but O’Neill is not in the least hoodwinked. There may well be statues erected in his honor one day in Dublin, but for now he wants to keep his counsel and maintain his critical distance – or does he?

“My life is an open book. All of the worst things I’ve ever done are all out there. There are no skeletons left in my closet,” he says.

Doesn’t that make him a stronger candidate? He smiles and says nothing. As several of Ireland’s most prominent conservative commentators discovered, you’d be a fool to underestimate this drag queen.

Questions about his future intentions lead him to reflect on how and why he got into drag in the first place.

“I liked that it was underground and transgressive and fun and discombobulating,” he explains. “Now I find myself in this weird position that Panti is actually Establishment in Ireland. That’s something I’m still adjusting and navigating through. Can I still be transgressive and be on the cover of silly magazines, you know?”

Meanwhile the Republic has made history with the Marriage Referendum and something has changed utterly for everyone – gay and straight – he says.

“Because we did it by referendum it changed how the gay community at home feel about themselves, because they are absolutely sure that Irish society is fine with them in a way that they weren’t before the referendum. They’re very confident and sure of their place now and you see that in the smallest ways with people holding hands in the street that you just didn’t see before.”

“It also changed how straight Irish people see themselves,” he adds. “They all realized that actually we are a forward-thinking, modern society who deeply value fairness.”

“It also transformed how the rest of the world sees us too. Most places still had this 1950’s 'The Quiet Man' view and thought there were bishops going around hitting everyone with a crosier still. That hasn’t been true in quite a while. The referendum announced that to rest of the world. It said 'Catch up. It’s not the place you think it is.'”

Do people in Ireland understand how famous he’s actually become? Has the celebrity ever gone to his head?

“You just adjust. I was forty something when it happened. I knew exactly who I was already. I travel a lot now and when I go to places like Sarajevo it’s incredible how our Irish story is inspiring to them. It’s difficult and dangerous to be gay there and then I come along and I tell them about Ireland. They’re where we were 30 years ago, but then Panti comes along and shows them dramatic change is possible. Our story in Ireland is making them courageous.”

Just like Ni Houlihan over a hundred years ago, Panti has helped inspire Ireland’s LGBT citizens to achieve their own independence. If she/he ever decides to cash in on that effort, the results could be equally unstoppable.

Don’t bet against her, you’ll lose.

Here is the trailer for The Queen of Ireland documentary about Panti, which she recently in town to introduce at the New York premiere (the film hasn't been released in the US yet):

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2016-10-10T04:48:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/irishamerica/10-moments-new-york-makes-you-proud-to-be-irish10 New York moments that make you proud to be Irish2016-10-06T07:24:30-04:00
It’s not the big celebration on Paddy’s Day or the fuss and and the party that make us all proud to be Irish but the day-to-day occurrences that remind us how lucky we are to come from a small country with a big personality.

1. Reading Seamus Heaney’s poetry on a subway poster

You’re in a rush, sick to death of the snow and just wanting to get through the journey home and relax. You happen to glance up from your book as you struggle to keep your balance in a packed car, still avoiding eye contact with everybody around you. Just in front of you, plastered on the car wall, is a poem from Seamus Heaney. As you read through the words, you forget the hustle and bustle around you, almost forget to look for your stop, as you think of the ways in which our countryman’s way with words has spread all over the world.

2. Hearing Irish artists on the radio

Not surprisingly, Hozier’s a big deal this side of the Atlantic, too. Not only are we lucky enough to have a traditional music and dance culture that is encouraged and supported in Ireland and abroad, we have made major contributions to the international music scene.

3. Hearing stories from people who’ve visited Ireland

You may have heard about the beautiful countryside a thousand times over but nobody would be saying it if it wasn’t true. Hearing these stories reminds us of the moments we may have forgotten: a big bowl of soup and brown bread in a pub snug on a rainy day, the sun shining on the Liffey as you walk up the quays with a ‘99, sandy sandwiches on a beach packed on a sunny Sunday afternoon or a hike through through the hills on a gusty day.

4. Using Irish on the subway

It makes us stand out, it lets people know that you are part of a different culture and it’s also something you have in common with all other nationalities that flock to the city. There’s nothing better than being able to use your own secret language to discuss other people on the train. Even if you just have a cúpla focal, being able to throw out an amadán (fool) at the person who rudely barged into you, or a náireach (embarrassing) at the person wearing the exact same dress, makes all the difference.

5. Being asked your opinion on Joyce, Beckett and Friel

As with Heaney, it makes you wonder how our small country managed to produce such talent. Students of English literature all over the world study the works of Irish authors and playwrights who’ve made an incredible contribution to the English language. Being asked your expert opinion may seem a little daunting, especially when you may not have read anything at all, but you're guaranteed to be greeted with enthusiasm if you can help others understand the mind of the Irish.

6. A fine Irish bar

Although we may attempt to distance ourselves from the drunken stereotype, if there is one thing we’re good at, it’s a good pub. Whether you’re a pioneer who goes for the social occasion or a drinker who goes to sample every drink on offer, a cosy atmosphere and a place to debate all of the world’s problems can always be guaranteed.

7. Seeing the empire state lit in green

New York City alone may have a population almost doubling our whole country’s but they still find us important enough to light up one of the city’s most iconic buildings in green in our honor. Seeing the green glow on the skyline from your Brooklyn apartment is guaranteed to set your heart alight with pride.

8. Accepting the gay community into our celebrations

This May will mark a very important moment in Irish history. As the country votes on the the topic of same-sex marriage, it is telling that it is also the first year that the NYC and Boston parades will allow LGBT groups to take part in festivities. The inclusion of these groups is a step in the direction of equality and inclusion, on a day when we all deserve the right to celebrate Ireland.

9. Seeing people learn traditional instruments/Irish dancing

Many people underestimate how fortunate the Irish are in their ability to maintain their traditional culture while still playing an important role internationally. Many countries suffer from a loss of their cultural heritage as time passes on, especially as the culture of wealthier countries begins to hold dominance over their own. The Irish, on the other hand, are still going strong with dancers and musicians spread to the four corners of the globe.

10. People attempting to copy your accent

As Julie Hecht says in her book Do the Windows Open? “Sometimes everything the Irish said sounded like a poem.” Yes, this may be cringe-inducing from time to time but isn’t it best to take it as a compliment? Nobody would be attempting to copy the Irish brogue if they didn’t like it so much, so instead of turning up your nose at any feeble attempts, teach them a few words that will make sure their Irish lingo is finely tuned.

So tell us! When do you feel #proudtobeIrish – is it something about Irish culture? Irish history? Ireland today? Is there someone in your family or community who makes you especially proud? We can’t wait to hear your stories.

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2016-10-06T07:24:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/irish-presidential-award-for-gay-inclusion-activists-after-ny-st-patrick-s-day-parade-fightIrish presidential award for gay activists who changed St. Patrick's Day parade2016-09-22T05:27:08-04:00Brendan Fay and Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy, the leaders of the Lavender and Green Alliance and the all-inclusive St. Pat’s for All parade in Queens, have another reason to celebrate 2016: both activists who led the charge to ensure LGBT inclusion in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade were named by the Irish government last week as recipients of the Presidential Distinguished Service Awards for the Irish Abroad.

The year started on a high thanks to the decision by parade leaders to allow Lavender and Green to march this year for the first time, and now Fay and Walsh D’Arcy are planning a trip to Ireland for the awards ceremony in December hosted by President Michael D. Higgins at Aras an Uachtarain, the presidential residence.

Walsh D’Arcy, upon receiving word from the Irish government about the honor, thought first of her parents. “They emigrated from Offaly and Tipperary, reluctantly, in the 1920s and found a community of Irish people in New York that worked to preserve Irish music, culture, politics – a community of people who took care of each other!” the long-time community activist told our sister publicatin the Irish Voice.

“Almost a century later, I am still part of that community. President Higgins' award for the Irish abroad is a great honor. I am so proud to be part of St. Pat's For All and to stand with Brendan Fay, our dedicated committee members, and all of the Irish Americans and organizations that have embraced our parade and our mission to cherish all of the children of the nation equally.”

Walsh D’Arcy has been co-chair of the St. Pat’s for All parade since 2006, and is a board member of the Lavender and Green Alliance.

A community organizer, feminist and human rights activist, she has been active in the New York Irish community all of her life, and lived in Ireland for several years. Her late husband, Philip D'Arcy, was born in Killusty, Co. Tipperary. Her daughter, Maeve D'Arcy, is an artist who has lived and studied in Ireland, and her work was exhibited in the Irish Arts Center in 2015.

With St. Pat's for All and Fay's Lavender and Green Alliance, she worked to foster inclusion and equality in New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade and marched up Fifth Avenue for the first time this year behind the Lavender and Green banner.

Fay said that the award “is a huge recognition of the movement to make our St. Patrick’s parades and celebrations more welcoming. The award is an acknowledgment of the efforts of LGBT immigrants finding our place in the New York Irish diaspora, and honors the Irish community who supported and advocated for inclusion in the face of prejudice.”

Fay, a native of Drogheda, Co. Louth, is co-founder of the Lavender and Green Alliance and in 1999 founded the St. Pat’s for All parade which takes place on the first Sunday of March in Sunnyside-Woodside, welcoming all participants.

The Irish government announced a number of award recipients from around the world last week. Now in their fifth year, the awards will also honor two more U.S.-based recipients – businessman and philanthropist Norman McClelland based in Phoenix, and Professor Garret FitzGerald, a renowned physician scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

McClelland, who was cited by the Irish government for his charitable work, is a philanthropist whose “endeavors have spanned the creation of one of the largest urban parks in the world; through sustained support for the St. Mary’s food bank, to whom he gives 80,000 pounds of food per month; and donating the college of management to Arizona State University; to the building of the Phoenix Irish Center, Library and Genealogical Center,” according to a press release.

FitzGerald’s work “has contributed substantially to the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease by low dose aspirin and has benefitted millions worldwide. He has also won several major international awards for his work on nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and is widely published in leading medical journals.” He will be recognized by the government for his contributions to science, technology and innovation.

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2016-09-22T04:18:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/catholic-crisis-in-nj-what-kind-of-a-21st-century-church-do-we-wantCatholic crisis in NJ - what kind of a 21st century church do we want?2016-09-18T07:11:42-04:00
The Miss America pageant was held last weekend in Atlantic City, where Miss Arkansas, named Savvy Shields, was crowned the winner.

But perhaps the most interesting news to come out of the pageant was that Irish American contestant Erin O’Flaherty, representing Missouri, was reported to be the first openly gay contestant in the Miss America contest.

This was an interesting bit of timing. About 130 miles up the Garden State Parkway another Irish American lesbian has been in the headlines. That would be Kate Drumgoole, a former student at Paramus Catholic High School who went on to become a guidance counselor as well as basketball coach at her alma mater.

In 2014, Drumgoole married her girlfriend. According to media reports, a “vindictive relative” posted photos of the wedding ceremony online.

Homosexuality and gay marriage are, of course, frowned upon by the Catholic Church. Drumgoole was fired, with archdiocese officials referring to her as “a poor role model” and to her lifestyle as “odious.”

This all comes as the Dublin-born Archbishop of Dallas Kevin J. Farrell prepares to lead a new Vatican department designed to chart the church’s future when it comes to “the Laity, the Family and Life.”

Well, as good a place as any for Farrell to start is to ask why, in God’s name, people like O’Flaherty and Drumgoole -- as well as the friends and family who love them -- would want to have anything to do with a church that would treat them this way?

Look, this crisis concerning the church and sexuality has been centuries in the making, so it will not be resolved neatly or easily. On the other hand, there does come a point where church officials might want to ask themselves if they are making a fairly simple issue unnecessarily complex.

By all accounts, Drumgoole was good at her job. (She is suing to get it back.) And yet, Newark Archdiocese official Father Thomas Nydegger wrote that Drumgoole’s “gay marriage and gay lifestyle (whether overt or covert)” is “particularly odious."

Not so odious, apparently, to the thousands of former Paramus Catholic students who voiced their outrage in a letter to the school leadership.

"You institutionalize the kind of oppressive worldview that leads students to bully and verbally abuse other students based on their sexual orientation," the letter read in part.

There are all kinds of easy points to make here, about how at least some Catholic officials from Newark -- and indeed across the country -- seem to have one standard for pedophile priests and quite another for gays and lesbians.

And there are also serious questions to be asked about the degree to which a religious institution has the right to expect its employees to serve as role models for the faithful.

But this question remains: Should Farrell even bother heading off to the Vatican to think about the future of the Catholic Church as it relates to families if a good guidance counselor can be fired for the “sin” of being married?

And Drumgoole is not alone. According to New Ways Ministry, an advocacy group for gay, lesbian and transgender Catholics, more than 50 people across the country have been fired or had job offers taken back since 2010 because of their sexual orientation.

Devout Catholics who like things the way they are point out that the church merely hates the sin, not the sinner. And that the church’s ways are ancient and unchanging.

On the former point, that is most certainly true -- all the more reason to at least consider reforming them. Why? Because the church over the years has, in fact, changed and evolved in ways big and small.

Pope Francis is the one who famously said, “Who am I to judge?” on the issue of sexual orientation. Apparently, not all Catholic big wigs are in step with Francis.

Sooner or later, from Rome to Paramus to Atlantic City, these folks have to figure out what kind of Catholic Church they want for the 21st century.

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2016-09-18T00:00:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/priest-blast-post-grindr-crisis-rules-in-maynooth-as-patheticPriest blasts post-Grindr crisis rules in Maynooth as “pathetic”2016-09-12T10:08:19-04:00
The strict new rules imposed on trainee priests in Maynooth following allegations students were using gay dating app Grindr have been blasted as "pathetic" by a founding member of a group representing over 1,000 Irish priests.

Last month the seminary's trustees announced a series of rigid new measures to curb student clerics' wayward behavior, including mandatory dining in the college and a requirement to attend evening rosary at 9 p.m.

The move followed an earlier decision from Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin to remove his seminarians from Maynooth, citing an atmosphere of "strange goings-on" at the college, and send them instead to the Irish Pontifical College in Rome.

But Father Tony Flannery, a founding member of the Association of Catholic Priests, said the tighter new controls have failed to address the real problem, namely enforced celibacy.

"There are two core issues that are at the heart of what is reputed to be happening in Maynooth, and is also showing itself in many other seminaries around the world,” Flannery said.

"Those are the rule of compulsory celibacy, and the variety and complexity of sexual attraction present among us humans, and the very faulty church teaching on sexuality generally and LGBT in particular."

Writing on his website www.tonyflannery.com, the outspoken Co. Galway Redemptorist, who's one of several Irish clerics who have been “silenced” by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith for their liberal views, added, "Are these men [the trustees] serious? Do they expect this effort at very traditional regimentation, and equally traditional spirituality, to solve the problems they believe existed?

"It is possible that these gentlemen believe that lining up the students for the rosary every evening is going to deal with these human situations? I'm afraid not."

Last month Martin decided to send his students to Rome following allegations, circulated in anonymous letters, that some seminarians had the used the gay dating app Grindr.

Speaking of his decision, he said, "There seems to be an atmosphere of strange goings-on there. It seems like a quarrelsome place with anonymous letters being sent around. I don't think this is a good place for students.

“However, when I informed the president of Maynooth of my decision, I did add, ‘At least for the moment.’"

Other recent measures introduced in Maynooth by the trustees following the allegations include a review of "appropriate use of the internet and social media" by the 50 clerics-in-training and their staff.

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2016-09-09T00:00:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/meet-erin-o-flaherty-first-openly-gay-contender-for-miss-america-videoMeet Erin O'Flaherty, first openly gay contender for Miss America (VIDEO)2016-10-03T05:12:57-04:00News that Erin O'Flaherty, Miss Missouri, will compete for the crown of Miss America this weekend as its first openly lesbian contestant has left some LGBT supporters in a real quandary.

Beauty “competitions” are a known tool of the patriarchy after all, an embarrassing throwback to the 'Mad Men' era (and even further back) which turns otherwise brilliant adult women into eye-catching adornments and arm candy and in doing so oppresses them. Why would anyone sign up for that?

Well, gay fans are lining up to cheer O'Flaherty on this weekend because she creates LGBT awareness and visibility within mainstream society – and that really matters. So it looks like most of the community are going for the second option and tuning in.

If she wins, she will be the first openly lesbian winner to do so in the pageant's 95-year history.

It helps that O'Flaherty is such an obvious good sport about it, too. To further endear herself to her own community O’Flaherty is competing on the platform of teen suicide prevention, an issue that's sadly of vital importance to the LGBT community, who face bullying and hostility at much higher frequency.

You may not be aware of this, but pageants are show business and show business is filled with the gays. So there's some poetic justice in the fact that now, after generations spent invisibly competing in or helping to present pageants behind the scenes, gays and lesbians will finally get to see someone like themselves walking onto the main stage.

“Behind the scenes, we’ve been well-represented, but I’m the first openly gay title holder, so I’m very excited,” O'Flaherty told The Associated Press. “I knew going in that I had the opportunity to make history. Now I get to be more visible to the community and meet more people.”

Aftet she won the Miss Missouri crown in June, Cosmopolitan magazine asked O'Flaherty if it had “been hard to live in states like Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida where they are generally more conservative than others” or if she had “felt any pressure to stay closeted for pageants or in your personal life?”

“I would never, ever let anybody pressure me to do that,” O'Flaherty replied. “This is who I am and the judges chose me! I’m not the kind of person who is going to give in to that pressure, but I actually haven’t felt that much pressure.”

Josh Randle, chief operating officer of the Miss America Organization, said the pageant reflects an evolving America. "Through every major milestone of our nation's evolution, Miss America has provided a voice for women from all walks of life, and, this year, we welcome our first openly gay contestant," he said.

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2016-09-07T00:53:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-church-leaders-hold-crisis-talks-over-trainee-priests-use-of-grindrIrish Church holds “crisis talks” over gay app Grindr used by trainee priests2016-08-27T04:05:43-04:00
Irish church leaders have reportedly been holding “crisis talks” over allegations that trainee Catholic priests in Ireland are frequently using the gay dating app Grindr.

Responding to the allegations Church leaders have ordered an urgent review of the “appropriate use of the internet and social media” at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the centuries-old Irish training centre for priests, and they have also called for a review of the way that whistle-blowers submit their complaints.

The talks come after the most senior Catholic in Ireland, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, said he was sending student priests to Rome, effectively boycotting Maynooth in County Kildare, which is located just 16 miles west of the capital.

Martin said the recent allegations that “a gay culture” exists at the school and that some students have allegedly been using Grindr, the gay dating app, could “be fostering promiscuous sexuality.”

Diarmaid continued that there were other unsettling allegations that whistleblowers were dismissed from the seminary after bringing the issue to the authorities.

To date no one has explained how or why heterosexual seminarians tracked the movement of gay seminarians via the gay dating app before alerting the authorities.

But the swift response to the allegations has some critics wondering what constitutes a “crisis” for the church? For years - in fact for decades - the abuse crisis in the church was often ignored or covered up so why have church leaders have moved so swiftly on this issue, some ask?

Others have laughingly questioned how sending new seminarians to Rome can be seen as a move to protect them from gay culture?

Some have suggested that the church’s rigidly enforced celibacy rule is what really fosters the secretive and “promiscuous sexuality” they complain of, and that their refusal to acknowledge the value of same sex marriage or relationships damages the opportunity for gay people to foster monogamous relationships.

Meanwhile four Archbishops and thirteen senior Bishops have called on the church to set up an independent audit into the running of both Irish seminaries at Maynooth and at St Malachy's in Belfast.

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2016-08-27T04:49:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/lawsuit-claims-boson-mayor-forced-st-patricks-parade-to-include-gay-groupLawsuit – Boston Mayor forced St. Patrick’s Day Parade to include gay group2016-08-03T06:20:57-04:00
The organizers of South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade have filed new legal papers this week claiming Mayor Marty Walsh “strong-armed” them into inviting an LGBT group to march in the parade for the first time in 2015.

The suit claims Walsh had threatened to withhold necessary permits that could have stopped the parade in its entirety, according to court documents filed on Monday and reported in the Boston Herald.

“The mayor of Boston has the authority to issue or not issue parade permits in the City of Boston,” attorney Chester Darling, 89, wrote in the complaint. “Mayor Walsh has repeatedly attempted to alter or control the plaintiff’s parade, by acts which are violations of the time, place and manner jurisprudence.”

According to the Boston Herald, the federal suit first filed in March asks for “permanent injunctive relief” against the city for what it calls “coercive and threatening acts.”

“The calls were coming from City Hall left and right, and the word was that the veterans were going to lose their parade,” Darling, who describes himself as a liberal conservative, told the Herald. “He sat there and said he was going to change the content of the parade.”

“This administration did not hold permits for anyone,” Walsh continued. “It’s sad when the press keeps reporting that we withheld permits when we didn’t.”

In 1995 Darling, who has previously represented LGBT plaintiffs, won a groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling allowing the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council to exclude gay groups on First Amendment grounds.

Twenty years later, Darling’s arguing that Walsh has effectively undermined that landmark decision with bully tactics and red tape.

Darling claims that during veterans council meetings with Walsh about the 2015 parade, Walsh said if LGBT groups weren’t included he might cancel the parade for “safety reasons.”

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2016-08-03T05:40:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/what-to-make-of-a-gay-1916-icon-roger-casements-heroic-status-was-deniedWhat to make of a gay 1916 icon? Roger Casement’s heroic status was denied2016-08-03T06:06:21-04:00
MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse. Every Irish school boy or girl knows the names of all the main players in the Easter Rising of 1916, but one revolutionary patriot has long been denied his due.

If you’ve never heard of Roger Casement, who was executed by th British for treason 100 years ago today, the reason is as simple as it is sad, he was homosexual. For that reason he was ignored when he was not being written out of our revolutionary history.

At the turn of the century Casement, a longtime diplomat and human rights activist, was undergoing a profound and personal transformation. His travels were proving to him that the British Empire (and other colonial European powers) were profiting from exploitation, cruelty and murder.

Witnessing the enslavement of plantation workers in the Congo and the workers on rubber plantations in Peru had a radicalizing effect, and being secretly gay he found himself identifying with the oppressed rather than the oppressor.

Casement’s increasingly radical political views led him away from the British consular service in 1913 and toward the Irish revolutionary movement.

In 1916 he volunteered to seek German support and guns for a rebellion in Ireland to drive the British out. But he was arrested, convicted, imprisoned in the tower of London and eventually executed for treason.

That series of developments ought to have inducted him into the Irish revolutionary hall of fame, but an an unexpected wrinkle in the tale prevented it. A set of diaries, which British authorities claimed he had written in the years 1903, 1910 and 1911 was circulated. They revealed that he was homosexual, that he was remarkably promiscuous, and that he usually paid for his encounters, which involved much younger men and teenagers from a lower social class.

But they also revealed that unlike most men of his background he was not racist, he took great delight in his dalliances, and he did not think himself superior to his conquests by dint of his station.

These diaries were soon being referred to in the press as the Black Diaries, the better to convey the universal condemnation they were expected to arouse. To the British they were a political godsend, because they knew Catholic disapproval of Casement’s homosexuality would undermine political repercussions for his execution. Conservative Catholic Ireland had no use for a gay patriot, they reasoned.

In all the decades since his execution many of Casement’s most ardent supporters have spent their academic lives insisting that his famous Black Diaries were forgeries, concocted by a British espionage office eager to tarnish his name and diminish his achievements.

All the public passion to rescue his reputation draws attention to the private impulse that guides it: in many people’s view you simply can’t be a patriot, a humanitarian and a homosexual. In fact, to hear some tell it, being gay is still incompatible with being Irish.

In his own time Casement’s abundant qualifications for first tier Irish martyrdom were harpooned by an aspect of his private life. Increasingly however, being gay is no longer being seen as a blot on his life and work.

On the contrary, more and more scholars are realizing that Casement’s homosexuality taught him greater compassion for the oppressed and opened his eyes to the epic hypocrisy of the British Empire’s global exploits. It was, as they say, the making of him.

Most men of his era thought otherwise, of course, and professed themselves horrified by what they read, each attempting to outdo the other in the search for new metaphors with which to convey their disgust.

In this way they played right into the hands of the British intelligence. Casement the hero was quickly disavowed as Casement the degenerate.

But the diaries remind us how Casement himself delighted in his own invigorating dualities: Irish but knighted by the British, an Ulster Protestant turned Catholic, an establishment figure with a subterranean gay life that kept him always at an interesting remove; even Casement’s rugged exterior contradicted prevailing notions about masculinity and homosexuality.

Simultaneously an insider and outsider, his double perspective allowed him to see what many others, constrained by their class and creed, could not. In this way being gay allowed him to cross the otherwise rigidly policed class and racial lines of his era, it helped him to grow.

It seems certain now that Casement’s epic promiscuity, which led him into doubtful dalliances and opens him to charges of crass exploitation of his own, was in part the response to the impossibility of living an openly gay life in that post-Wildean era.

Gay relationships opened him up to whisper campaigns and blackmail attempts, but furtive and fleeting encounters with nameless and often much younger partners (who were usually far below his own social station) kept the worst talk at bay.

In this way Casement eluded the law, but in consequence he also eluded an important part of himself: connections were made but immediately broken, taking with them the possibility of growth.

The diaries are a secret record of his forcibly secret life, but they are also clearly in rebellion against it; for Casement sexual oppression found its echo in colonial oppression and it is hard to guess where one ended and the other began for him.

Like Oscar Wilde, Casement was forced to live his life twice over, once as a genteel functionary of the British establishment, and once as furtive homosexual and closet Irish revolutionary.

It was his overarching passion for justice that gave him away. Intelligence services took note of his angry reports about the cruelty and indentured slavery of the natives by colonial powers in the Congo and Peru.

They were especially alarmed by his conflation of these conditions with the conditions of the Irish. “The ‘white Indians’ of Ireland,” Casement wrote in 1913, “are heavier on my heart than all the Indians of the rest of the earth.”

Casement’s first anti-British essays were published in 1911. He resigned from the consular service in 1913 and by then he was already an ardent convert to revolutionary Irish nationalism.

To stifle the outcry from Irish America after his arrest for treason in 1916 (at the time the British were courting America to join the Allies) the British sent salacious extracts from the Black Diaries to carefully handpicked journalists, politicians and community leaders in the United States and the gambit worked instantly. Calls for clemency were muted.

Reactions in England and the United States were predictable, but in Ireland they had a little more nuance. A Dublin clergyman who had known him wrote to the Home Office in London suggesting that he be sent away to a lunatic asylum for the criminally insane rather than executed, even though “my wife thought him the most interesting and charming man she had ever met.”

Time was already writing Casement’s epitaph, however. The revolutionary generation of men like James Connolly and all their emancipatory rhetoric would be supplanted by the rural, inward-looking and heavily conservative Catholic ethos of men like Eamon de Valera.

That disastrous ascension spelled the end for Casement’s deification to the pantheon of revolutionary demigods. The leaders of the new Republic would neither admit to his homosexuality nor would they elevate him because of it. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell became the official policy toward him and in some quarters it still is.

By now it’s become apparent that Casement will never be the white marble statue that some in the republican movement have called for. Nor will he be the sainted man of principle that many wanted to cast him as; nor will he be the passionate humanitarian free of any trace of the imperialism he decried, nor will he be the irredeemable degenerate.

Instead he is a complex and sometimes troubling mix of all of these elements, added to the prevailing attitudes of his era. His life was certainly a dramatic renouncement of the excesses of the British Empire – but he was a man in full, not a sainted effigy.

And his legacy still has much to teach us. If we can appreciate more of that flawed but humanitarian legacy now, it’s because his relevance has only increased with time.

In the years since his death he has forced Ireland, and especially its political leadership, to confront their own prejudices. There are few figureheads who have ever done likewise.

* Originally published in April 2015.

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2016-08-03T02:05:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/archbishop-of-dublin-moves-trainee-priests-out-of-maynooth-seminaryArchbishop of Dublin moves trainee priests out of Maynooth seminary2016-10-15T11:56:01-04:00
The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has announced that he will not send trainee priests from his own diocese, the largest in Ireland, to the national seminary at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

When asked about his decision to send three seminary students from Dublin to the Irish Pontifical College in Rome instead of Maynooth later this autumn, Dr Martin said “I wasn’t happy with Maynooth…”

"I have my own reasons for doing this," the Archbishop continued. “There seems to an atmosphere of strange goings-on there, it seems like a quarrelsome place with anonymous letters being sent around. I don’t think this is a good place for students,” he said.

Martin made his assessment after a series of anonymous letters alleging inappropriate behavior among some of the seminarians in Maynooth made headlines, including claims that some of them may have used the hookup app Grindr, which is primarily used to arrange gay sexual encounters.

But Dr Martin made no comment on those sensational reports to the Irish Times, instead explaining that he had what he called a “certain bonding” with Rome (where he lived and worked for in the Holy See for 25 years) and where he felt the Irish college offered “a good grounding” in the Catholic faith.

Monsignor Ciaran O’Carroll, the rector of the Irish college, confirmed that the three Dublin based seminarians would be “transferring” to Rome, adding this was very much the usual practice, since this was the time of year when bishops nominated students for the college.

It is however extremely unusual for Irish seminarians to be transferred from Maynooth to Rome after an Archbishop cites “strange goings on” in the national seminary as the reason for the transfer.

Maynooth currently has around 60 seminarians in residence and when rumors broke of “inappropriate behavior” earlier this year a spokesperson quickly assured the press that procedures were in place to handle any controversial complaints against seminarians.

The suggestion that a thriving gay subculture exists at Ireland’s national seminary first came to light in May of this year after anonymous letter suggested that both seminarians and staff members at Maynooth had been using the hookup app Grindr.

At the time Monsignor Hugh Connolly told The Irish Catholic the church intended to "thoroughly deal" with any concerns regarding such behavior.

Meanwhile, acknowledging that the number of seminarians for Dublin has dropped, the Archbishop told the Irish Independent "What is more important for me is the quality of the men who come forward and the training that they receive."

The fact that the Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, in whose diocese Maynooth sits, apparently believes that Maynooth is currently an unsuitable place to train Irish priests is a remarkable development.

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2016-08-02T02:55:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-muslim-community-invites-lgbt-community-to-share-in-ramadan-celebrationsIrish Muslim community invites LGBT community to share in Ramadan celebrations2016-09-12T10:09:19-04:00
After the tragic Orlando shooting, the Muslim community in Ireland is extending an invitation to the LGBT Irish community to join them in Ramadan celebrations.

“Last year we extended the invitation to the Jewish community and this year we thought it would be nice to extend the invitation to the LGBT community because they have been marginalised and suffered as a result of the Orlando shooting,” said the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council.

“Ramadan inspired and motivated us to reach out. People think that Muslims can’t reach out to the LGBT community, but that’s wrong. We can open our hearts and doors to anyone.”

Ramadan is an annual Islamic tradition of abstaining from food, drink and sex between dawn and sunset during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar.

The LGBT community have been invited to visit the Al-Mustafa Islamic Center at Blanchardstown on Saturday to join in Iftar, a meal that ends Ramadan.

“As more than one billion Muslims worldwide celebrate Ramadan by fasting and appreciating the blessings given to us, it is important for the Irish Muslim community to reach out to our neighbours as an example of true Islamic ideals,” said Shaykh Dr Umar Al-Qadri, chairman of Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council and imam of the Al-Mustafa Islamic Centre mosque

The Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council is a nationwide Muslim body in Ireland established to provide a forum where the Irish Muslim community can speak as one recognized voice on matters relating to their well-being in Ireland. They also aim to encourage individual Muslims and Muslim organizations to play a full and participatory role in Irish public life.

In July 2015, the organization held a “Not in Our Name” protest in Dublin in which they condemned the use of violence by ISIS as a distortion of their beliefs and called on Muslims in Ireland to adopt a strategy which would prevent radicalization.

They also released a document entitled “Irish Muslim Declaration of Peace and Guide to Prevent Radicalization,” a strategy against radicalization in Ireland.

Islam still remains a minority religion in Ireland although it is the most popular non-Christian faith practiced in the country. The 2011 census stated that 49,204 Muslims live in the Republic (1.07%), a 51 per cent increase on figures from 2006. According to census figures, 30.7 per cent of Muslims in the country have Irish nationality.

Dr. Umar Al-Qadri was among those who stood with the LGBT community following the mass shooting of 50 people in an Orlando nightclub last month.

“I stand with the LGBT community and I am against the marginalization of any group,” he told the Irish Examiner. “It should not have happened. We are a minority ourselves, we understand what discrimination is.”

“This is more of a case of someone with psychiatric issues. His wife came out and said he had some issues. He may be a Muslim but he does not represent Islam.

“The point is, first of all, 50 innocent people have lost their lives and it’s a tragedy.

“The disregard of human life is one of the greatest challenges we are facing in the world today. He may be a Muslim but he does not represent Islam.”

Tweeting support for @DrUmarAlQadri who has been criticised for inviting members of LGBT community to celebrate Eid al-Fitr

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2016-07-01T14:00:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/bill-donohue-says-forget-the-pope-gays-should-apologize-to-him-videoBill Donohue says forget the pope, gays should apologize to him (VIDEO)2016-06-30T05:44:58-04:00
Pope Francis said this week that the Catholic Church should apologize to gay people for excluding them or discriminating against them in the past. Instead the Church should respect them and accompany them pastorally throughout their lives, he said.

“The church must say it is sorry for not having behaved as it should many times, many times. When I say ‘the Church,’ I mean we Christians, because the Church is holy; we are the sinners,” the pontiff said. “We Christians must say we are sorry.”

But Francis’ groundbreaking conciliatory words were not well received by his self-appointed spokesman in the U.S., President of the Catholic League, spokesman Bill Donohue.

Speaking to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Donohue took a less than supportive tone.

“Do you feel like apologizing to the LGBT community?” Cuomo asked Donohue, who exploded at the question.

“No,” said Donohue. “As a matter of fact, I want an apology from gays! I’ve been assaulted by gays. I’ve never assaulted a gay person in my entire life!”

Asked why he was so invested in battling LGBT rights when there were many good Christian works he could be performing, like helping the poor, Donohue shot back: “I don’t care what gay people do. I don’t want to have a lifestyle thrusted in my face though. That’s a different kind of thing altogether.”

“What do you mean thrusted?” Cuomo asked. “How are they putting their gay on you?”

Donohue replied that American businesses should be allowed to discriminate against LGBT people who request services for a wedding ceremony.

Cuomo then referred to the Pope’s remarks that gay people shouldn’t be judged, which tipped Donohue over into an onscreen meltdown.

“He has said that gay marriage is the work of the devil. He has said that gender ideology – you know, the trans, the trans people? He says that gender ideology is demonic. That is the Pope that I like!”

It’s official – the President of the Catholic League now believes himself to be more Catholic than the pope.

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2016-06-30T06:39:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/irish-pride-parade-shows-support-for-orlando-after-mass-murderIrish Pride parade shows support for Orlando after mass murder2016-06-30T12:40:39-04:00
The 49 people shot dead in a gay club in Orlando were remembered on banners and flags at the Dublin Gay Pride parade.

Up to 50,000 people, including non-gays, took to the streets of the capital for a day of dancing and parties.

Aidan Kenny of the Teachers Union of Ireland said he had come along to support all those at the event, particularly after the Orlando shootings on June 12.

Ireland’s gay hero, Rory O’Neill aka drag-queen Panti, said in advance of the event that the parade would have more of a sense of purpose because of what happened in Orlando.

Two years ago, a videoed speech by O’Neill at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in response to events surrounding an RTE gay controversy, garnered over a million page views and was described by Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole as “the most eloquent Irish speech” in almost 200 years.

On Saturday, at the pride march organized by Dublin’s gay community, sparkling drag queens mimed and sang along to the dance music and took selfies, waving and blowing kisses to the crowds below.

Sarah Mulhall from Dublin and her fiancée Anthea Feeney from Sligo got engaged last year, two weeks before the marriage equality referendum. They said they feel a change in the air since the referendum.

Feeney explained, “You feel a lot better walking down the street knowing that your own public support you. Even the little town that I live in, Sligo – it’s tiny – it got the highest Yes vote in the referendum.”

The couple will marry in Sligo in December.

The largest pride festival in Ireland has grown from a one-day event in 1974 into an almost week-long celebration, with arts and cultural events.

This year's theme was “Rebel Rebel” honoring the historic events of 1916 and also paying tribute to David Bowie who died earlier this year in New York.

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2016-06-30T05:54:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/miss-missouri-erin-oflaherty-is-miss-americas-first-openly-gay-contestantMiss Missouri Erin O’Flaherty is Miss America’s first openly gay contestant 2016-06-24T06:03:35-04:00
Erin O’Flaherty made history on June 18 when she was crowned Miss Missouri: she is the first openly gay woman to hold that title.

Now, as she continues on to the national Miss America pageant, Erin is on track to make more history still, as the first out lesbian to compete for the title of Miss America, and maybe, with a little luck of the Irish, win.

O’Flaherty, 23, graduated from the University of Central Florida with a major in legal studies and owns a boutique clothing shop, Rachel’s Grove, in Chesterfield, a suburb of St. Louis, with her mother, aunt and sister.

She came out at the age of 18 and was open about her sexuality throughout the Miss Missouri competition.

"My focus of my year isn't going to be that I'm gay," she said. "It's certainly a big part of who I am, and I will be promoting it and raising awareness for the LGBT community. But also there will be many appearances that I do that have nothing to do with that."

At the Miss America pageant, which takes place September 11 in Atlantic City, O’Flaherty’s platform will be suicide prevention, in memory of her best friend in high school, who took her own life. In an interview with Missouri’s Mexico Ledger, O’Flaherty shared that had she known more about depression and suicide, she may have been better able to help her friend, making her mission of spreading awareness exceptionally personal.

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2016-06-24T06:32:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/the-gay-gaels-who-have-enriched-irelands-history-and-the-prejudice-remaining“Gay Gaels” who have enriched Ireland’s history and culture for the world2016-08-05T16:49:04-04:00
Dermot McEvoy is the author of "The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising." This passage is taken from his recent book “Irish Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ireland.” This chapter is entitled “Gay Gaels.”

Every St. Patrick’s Day for the past 20-odd years, the old debate would be renewed. Should gays be banned from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade? (Note: New York City has finally relented, and so has Boston.) The Church—which has had more than their share of their own gay problems—the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other like-minded organizations banded together, thought back fondly on their 19th century prejudices, and shouted an authoritarian “NYET!” There were all kinds of excuses (“Gays can march, but they can’t do so under a banner”), but everyone knews the real reason. The one word answer was “prejudice.”

It’s ironic that this bigotry towards gays should have remained so prevalent in current times, since Ireland’s history has been enriched, yesterday and today, by its gay members. And you don’t have to look too hard either for great examples—two of the sixteen men executed by the British in 1916 were most likely gay—Sir Roger Casement (definitely) and Padraig Pearse (probably latently). Oscar Wilde was hounded to his grave because he flaunted Victorian law and convention. (Ironically, both Casement and Wilde would be pursued and prosecuted, Inspector Javert-style, by Sir Edward Carson, the less than patriotic Orange bigot.)

Two of Ireland’s most well-known writers, Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, have more than their occupation and city of birth in common—both were bisexual. People forget that Wilde, one of the great flamboyant characters of all time, had a wife and fathered two children before his tragic fall. Behan’s image of ex-IRA man, saloon-loving iconoclast, contrasts almost violently with his affection for young boys, revealed first by Ulick O’Connor in his Behan biography, Brendan. Despite having a devoted wife and fathering a child, Behan’s homosexuality, which first blossomed when he was serving time in a British borstal for young boys, frightened and disturbed him until his premature death in 1964.

Micheál Mac Liammóir, who along with his lover Hilton Edwards, founded the Gate Theatre in 1928. (The famous Dublin line about what separated the Gate and Abbey Theatres—“It’s the difference between Sodom and Begorra”—may also have referred to Mac Liammóir’s sexual preference.) He was known for his openly gay and flamboyant lifestyle. His film works included Iago in Orson Welles’s Othello, the narrator of Tom Jones, and the part of Sweet Alice in John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter. On stage his one-man show about Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Oscar, was critically acclaimed. He claimed to have had a homosexual relationship with General Eoin O’Duffy, one-time head of the Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. He died in 1978.

Thomas MacGreevy was a poet, critic, and a friend to both Joyce and Beckett in Paris. He was also director of National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. In his book, “Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist”, Anthony Cronin wrote “It might be accurate to say that his [Beckett’s] relationship with MacGreevy had, though it was not sexual, an element of the homo-erotic in it, as indeed some of Beckett’s later relationships were to have.” MacGreevy died in 1967.

In recent years other Irish writers have come out and declared their homosexuality, most prominently novelist Colm Tóibín and Nuala O’Faolain, who wrote about her relationship with Nell McCafferty in Are You Somebody? But there was a legal fight ahead that would shock, nudge, then shove Ireland into the 21st century.

Twenty-First Century? This Way

“We were the most conservative revolutionaries in history.”

Those are the words of Kevin O’Higgins, one of the architects of the modern Irish state and one of the most controversial figures in Irish history. What he might have been talking about is that after 700 years of occupation and a bloody six-year revolution the Irish adopted most British laws verbatim. Revolution is supposed to be for change. Apparently for the Irish, just a change in administrator was needed because the British laws were, well, swell.

So The Offenses Against the Person Act 1861 (in the vernacular, the anti-buggery act) and The Criminal Law of Amendment of 1885 (the gross indecency act)—laws written by the English—remained on the law books of the Republic of Ireland up until the 1980s.

Enter David Norris. Norris is an Irish Senator and a Joyce scholar. He is also openly gay. He challenged the law in the Irish Supreme Court and lost. He then brought his case to the European Court of Human Rights (basically suing his own country in Norris v. Ireland) and finally in 1988 won. Finally, in 1993 both laws were repealed.

So, finally, on gay rights at least, Ireland was brought into the light of the 20th century. Then, in May of 2015, it led the way into the 21st century, when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage by a public vote.

Dublin every June has its own Gay Pride Parade and many of the partiers end up at The George, Dublin’s foremost gay bar on South Great Georges Street, to continue the celebration.

Brendan Behan wrote a poem about the death of Oscar Wilde in which he said “No Pernod to brace him/Only holy water.” You just know that if Oscar Wilde were around today he’d be sipping his Pernod Absinthe, straight, at the bar of The George. And I think Brendan might join him.

* Dermot McEvoy was born in Dublin in 1950 and immigrated to New York City four years later. He is a graduate of Hunter College and has worked in the publishing industry for his whole career. He is the author of "The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising," "Terrible Angel," "Our Lady of Greenwich Village," and "The Little Green Book of Irish Wisdom." He lives in Greenwich Village, New York.

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2016-06-21T02:05:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/homophobia-thanks-to-gun-lobby-is-now-weapons-grade-in-americaHomophobia, thanks to gun lobby, is now massacring gays in America2016-06-15T06:08:27-04:00
How do I know this weekend's shooting massacre in Orlando was an anti-gay hate crime?

Because 49 LGBT people are dead. Because they were targeted in an LGBT nightclub. Because every LGBT person in the country can feel the threat and implications of this attack in the pit of their stomachs the way they were intended to.

Yes it was terrorism, but it was terrorism motivated by homophobia. That point is essential to grasp.

There were two attackers. One successfully carried out his plan in Orlando and the other was foiled in Los Angeles. One was Muslim and the other was Christian, both were born here, both were American citizens, neither of them knew of each other, neither was particularly religious, both of them said they wanted to harm gay people and one of them succeeded.

It was nauseating to watch opportunistic craw thumpers like Donald Trump, no friend to the gay community, rush to Twitter and to the national press to congratulate himself on being right about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

Doing a victory lap before the victims had been named or their loved ones even informed of their passing shows you just how self-regarding his blowhard candidacy really is.

I thought I could not loathe Trump or what he represents more than I already did until I saw him Tweeting out congratulations to himself within hours of the attack. 49 young people were dead, but for Trump the real story was that he was right to stop Muslims from coming to the country.

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

But the truth is the shooter, like Trump himself, was born in Queens, and the other captured shooter was born in Indiana. Trump’s hucksterism, given these facts, was unspeakable.

On Sunday morning as Trump was making his repulsive victory laps I was fielding multiple phone calls from my horrified gay friends, many in floods of tears on the phone, crying for people they didn't know but being gay could easily identify with, because every gay person shares some formative experiences in common, including knowing what it means to be threatened for who they are.

What really froze my blood was the thought of being a mother or father or lover or friend on the other side of a flickering cell phone screen when that assault rifle attack was occurring.

Knowing that you're utterly powerless to help them. Knowing that someone you love is being ruthlessly hunted by a man with an assault rifle. Knowing how fixed the fight is, how one-sided, how cell phones and pleas for mercy are no match for high powered rifles and homophobic hatred.

The Orlando shooter was not a lone wolf, no matter what the news reports say. Neither was the man who planned to attack the Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles. They belonged – they actually volunteered to belong – to a much larger, longstanding international prejudice that crosses every border and creed, one that emboldened and approved of their actions.

Homophobia isn't unique to the Arab world. It's true that ISIS regularly throws gay men as young as 15 from tall buildings to their death, but we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back too enthusiastically, because violent hate crimes against gay people in the United States were up again last year, with over half of the victims failing to even report them to the police.

Two hundred anti-gay bills have been proposed by lawmakers in the United States in the last six months. Not five or ten or even 15 bills - 200. Each one of those bills says that gay people are less deserving of the same rights that everyone else takes for granted. That message is endorsed most of all by the people who hate us and want to harm us.

If the law says we are less than and society says we are less than, what's to stop anyone with a bias from attacking us? Which bathrooms will transgender people be allowed to hide in during the next anti-gay assault rifle shooting, I wonder?

Hate crimes against trans people rose 32 percent last year. No doubt the lawmakers crafting the so-called bathroom bills that make trans people look like drooling predators (despite there having never been a single case of a trans woman molesting a young girl in a bathroom in the history of this country) will insist there is no connection between the terrifying narrative they are crafting and the fact that many people clearly feel free to threaten or assault them for dire threats they do not actually pose.

Here's a thing you might not know. When you're gay you learn early on how to read every room, street and city that you walk into. You grow a sort of antennae that scan every situation you enter for the merest hint of a threat. It's a survival skill; you have it because you'll need it.

You learn to see flying fists coming before anyone else does and you can feel a room darken before an attack. Straight women have a similar – though not quite the same – skill set. We are all of us forced to live under the unforgiving rule of men, after all.

Because I developed this survival skill set as a teenager I know that most of the people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando shared it too. I know that they knew pretty quickly what was coming for them, even over all the loud music and flashing lights. I know that they knew because I've seen some of their frantic text messages in the news reports. “He's coming for me. I'm going to die,” one read, unforgettably.

Some news reports are now suggesting that the Orlando shooter, although twice divorced with one child, visited the Pulse gay bar that he later attacked on multiple occasions. Reports claim he maintained profiles on gay social apps like Grindr and Adam4Adam. The California would-be killer was said to gay too.

Some have suggested that these were simply monitoring accounts, set up for the sole purpose of stalking his intended victims. Others are suggesting he was a bipolar, or a conflicted closet case, or someone whose religious background and openly homophobic father made it impossible for him to live an authentic life.

Whether he was inspired by radical Islamism, or homophobia, or mental illness, or all three, the real problem is this unbalanced shooter on an FBI terrorist watch list had no problem walking into a store and buying a semi-automatic rifle. Without an AR-15 he would just have been another disgruntled schmuck at a bar.

So more guns doesn't mean more safety, it means more chances of being shot by guns. There was at least one reported guard on duty at the Pulse nightclub. She was shot dead. Police then got into a live standoff with the shooter and multiple shots were fired on both sides. Guns didn't fix the problem, they simply inflamed it.

Meanwhile, I don't know who the shooter is and I don't care. I have pointedly not printed his name. He doesn't deserve to to mentioned in the same breath as his victims. Those 49 people are more than just a list of names. They are people who loved and who were loved.

Their loved ones have just had their lives destroyed over insane American gun laws that sell weapons of mass destruction to anyone with a few hundred dollars in their hand.

Homophobia has always been with us. But thanks to the GOP senators who voted to permit people on FBI watch lists to buy assault weapons – and thanks to the National Rifle Association which represents the gun manufacturers and not the gun owners – that anti-gay toxic prejudice has now found a way to become weapons grade, with a body count unprecedented in American history.

The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan Tweeted yesterday, “I hope the gay agenda now is 'take down the NRA' because they could do it.” He's right about that. Gay people are not fooled about who really facilitated the lethal carnage at the weekend.

That means we must confront the political leaders and the out of control gun lobby now. We have already waited too long to smack them down. America has no place for this insane carnage. None. Shame. Back you go. It's time.

Unlike every other social group in the USA, LGBT people are literally everywhere. In the Army, the Navy, the White House and the Pentagon. We're in the churches, the state capitols and all the press. We're Republicans and Democrats and Independents. Our diversity is what makes us such formidable opponents.

And what will make us utterly relentless now in pursuit of an assault weapons ban is that we know, thanks to our politicians and the NRA, that our very lives depend on it.

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2016-06-15T02:04:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/ireland-stands-with-lgbt-community-after-orlando-mass-shootingIreland stands with LGBT community after Orlando mass shooting2016-06-14T02:32:50-04:00The Irish LGBT community gathered at a vigil last night to honor of the victims of Saturday night’s mass shooting in Orlando.

Irish gay rights organizations and LGBT support groups paid their respects to the victims of 29-year-old Omar Mateen, who opened fire in Pulse nightclub in the early hours of Sunday morning, killing 49 and injuring 53 others, some critically, at a gathering on Dublin’s Dame Street.

Pulse was celebrating a Pride event as part of US Pride month and it is believed the attack was sparked by Mateen’s homophobia. Wielding an assault rifle and a handgun, he opened fire in the club at 2am Sunday morning. He was later killed in a shootout with officers after taking hostages.

The attack was the deadliest shooting in recent US history and Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. Mateen was an American Muslim of Afghan descent and his links to terrorist organizations are currently being investigated.

In a joint statement released yesterday, Irish LGBT groups BeLongTo, GLEN and Teni said: “Speaking on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Ireland, our deepest sympathies and condolences go out to the survivors and friends, families and loved ones of those who died.”

The groups also called for solidarity, asking for LGBT Muslims, in particular, to be remembered.

“Let us remember that LGBT Muslims are equally as terrified of an indiscriminately homophobic killer as anyone else, but are now likely to face increased racism as a result of this attack,” the statement said.

“One of the most powerful acts of solidarity we witnessed in the wake of the attack came from The Council on American-Islamic Relations in the US, an Islamic civil rights group, urging Muslims in the area to donate blood. Let’s make this tragedy bring our diverse intersectional communities together, not tear it apart.”

Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Enda Kenny also expressed his condolences in a letter to US President Barack Obama.

Speaking on behalf of the people of Ireland, Kenny wrote: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of the United States, the community in Orlando and the LGBT community, and above all with the families and loved ones of those so senselessly killed and injured.

“Once again we have witnessed the horror of young people being attacked as they enjoy themselves in their own community.

“Words cannot capture the shock and revulsion felt in Ireland, and around the world, at this outrage.”

His words were echoed by Irish President Michael D. Higgins.

“Our thoughts are with the people of Florida and the community in Orlando and Orange County at this difficult time,” Higgins said, according to The Irish Times.

“The loss of innocent life on such a horrendous scale is truly shocking and challenges us all.”

President Michael D. Higgins sent his condolences to the families of the victims of the shooting in Orlando: https://t.co/rIGDkcrGjP

Sinn Féin councillor Mary Ellen Campbell, who was recently elected as Belfast city’s first openly gay deputy mayor, expressed her horror “at the slaughter of innocents.”

"This attack on a group of people enjoying a Pride event is an attack on the progress that the LGBT community globally have made in the struggle for human dignity and respect,” she told The Irish News.

“The world needs to show its support for the LGBT community at this time."

Catholic Archbishop Eamon Ryan joined those offering their condolences stating, “The taking of innocent human life is always wrong.”

“On behalf of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference I wish to express my profound condolences and I offer prayers of solidarity from Ireland to those who have been touched by this tragedy in the United States.”

President of Sinn Féin Gerry Adams released a statement extending his sympathy to the family and friends of the victims.

“I want to extend my sincerest and heartfelt sympathy and solidarity to the families and friends of those killed and the survivors of the despicable act of brutality and hate in Orlando yesterday,” Adams said.

“The Orlando shooting is a painful and harrowing reminder of the struggle for gay, lesbian and transgender equality the world over. My thoughts and prayers are with all of those affected at this time.”

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2016-06-14T02:02:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/anthony-sullivan-waited-forty-one-years-for-his-marriage-based-green-card-videoAnthony Sullivan waited forty one years for his marriage-based green card (VIDEO)2016-06-08T02:07:50-04:00
Anthony Sullivan, 72, had to wait over forty years for his marriage to be deemed legally valid by the federal government but this month – after a four-decade long wait – he was finally granted a green card based on his April 1975 same-sex marriage to Richard Adams.

Adams originally filed the green card petition for Sullivan, a native of Australia, in 1975. After Adams died in December 2012, Sullivan sought to have the Immigration Service recognize their forty-year marriage and grant him a green card as the widower of a U.S. citizen.

The green card, granting Sullivan permanent residence status, was finally issued on the 41st anniversary of his Boulder, CO marriage to Adams – a unique same-sex marriage that remained on the state records without being invalidated by Colorado officials.

The couple’s remarkable four-decade long story began on April 21, 1975, after they learned that the county clerk in Boulder was issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Adams, a U.S. citizen, married Sullivan at the registration office and received a legal marriage certificate, then the couple (together since 1971) returned home to Los Angeles where Adams filed a green card petition with the INS on Sullivan’s behalf.

Reluctant trailblazers, they became one of the first gay couples in American history to legally marry, and the first on record to sue the U.S. government for recognition of their marriage.

But in 1975 immigration authorities famously rejected the couple’s green card petition, writing that the pair had “failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.”

Over the next ten years the couple brought an exhaustive but ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against the Immigration and Naturalization Service in federal court. When the final ruling was handed down from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1985 they were forced to quit the country.

When they quietly returned to the U.S. in 1986, they were then forced by circumstances to keep a low profile, living in constant fear of Sullivan’s deportation.

But the shadow they had lived under all their lives finally lifted just before Adam’s death in 2012. That year the Obama administration issued a memo to protect all low-risk family members of U.S. citizens from deportation, including same-sex partners of American citizens.

Forty-one years after they received a bluntly bigoted letter from immigration authorities, the White House asked the Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to issue a written apology to the long suffering couple.

In 2016, in the same Los Angeles Immigration office that originally denied Sullivan’s green card petition, immigration authorities finally recognized the marriage and determined that Sullivan should be treated like all other surviving spouses under U.S. immigration law.

In December 2012 when Adams was dying of cancer, attorney Lavi Soloway strongly urged the couple to consider remarrying in Washington state. After some discussion the couple reluctantly agreed, deciding to think of it as a renewal of their vows rather than a completely new wedding. Adams passed away the next day.

Stricken by grief Sullivan was nonetheless determined that his decades-long marriage to Adams should be honored with all the dignity and legal protections offered to other widowers.

“I wrote to President Obama,” he told the press. “I requested, basically for Richard, an apology for the faggot letter, because I felt that as an American citizen, he didn’t deserve to have that on his record. Because he loved his country.”

Leon Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, later wrote to Sullivan on behalf of the President: “This agency should never treat any individual with the disrespect shown toward you and Mr. ­Adams. You have my sincerest apology for the years of hurt caused by the deeply offensive and hateful language used in the November 24, 1975, decision and my deepest condolences on your loss.”

Now, with full recognition of their marriage and his news green card in hand, Sullivan reflects on the forty-one years the couple's journey took.

“The same office that said we had failed to establish that a relationship can exist between two faggots now says yes. And on the day of our anniversary!”

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2016-06-08T02:06:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-sisters-from-cork-who-were-once-bothers-are-transitioning-togetherIrish sisters from Cork who were once brothers are transitioning together2016-05-27T06:13:02-04:00
Chloe and Jamie O’Herlihy, Irish sisters from Cork, have created a huge buzz, making headlines from their native Ireland to the US and Turkey, with the news that they will be transitioning together.

Jamie (23) and Chloe (20; formerly Daniel), came out as gay when they were in their teens. But, as they told Casters News, they both spent years struggling silently with their gender identities.

Finally, last summer, when Jamie was home from Dublin for Chloe’s graduation, Jamie came out to Chloe and their family as transgender. This was the tipping point for Chloe, too.

“It’s weird that we were both going through exactly the same thing and having the same thoughts about being trans but just not talking to each other,” Chloe told Casters.

“I always wore makeup and had longer hair. I’ve never really been considered one of the lads, I was always one of the girls.

“Then when Jamie came out and told us, I was like ‘right this is something you are going to have to face too’.”

Jamie came to her realization when, performing in drag shows, she acknowledged how comfortable she felt dressed up.

“It’s a cliché to say ‘I always knew,’ but I did and I just kept pushing it to the back of my mind,” she told Casters.

“I tried to ignore it but it got to the point where when the morning came round I didn’t want to take off the drag because it was a better representation of me than I was.”

A few months later, each sister was ready to come out to their friends and colleagues.

The story behind Chloe’s choice of name is especially sweet: when their mother was pregnant with her, doctors had initially said she was having a baby girl. Jamie, who was ecstatic over the idea of a sister, made their mother promise she would name the baby Chloe. Instead, it was Daniel.

Now, the O’Herlihy sisters are sharing their story with the aim of inspiring people to live true to who they are.

Jamie, who works as a bartender in Dublin, and Chloe, who is in school to be a hair stylist, will begin taking estrogen therapy soon, with the eventual goal being gender re-assignment surgery.

The news broke yesterday that their journeys will be followed by Dublin production company Straywave Media, who will be making a documentary about the O’Herlihys.

John Norton of Straywave told the Irish Sun, “They are beacons for transgender people because they know what it is like to come out.

“They know a lot of young people who are now where they were – too afraid to do something to change their lives for the better.”

They will also be each other’s constant sources of support throughout the transitioning process.

“We talk a lot about our transition and it is great to have each other,” Chloe told Casters. “We know exactly how each other feel. If I’m out and I get a funny look or comment and I’m feeling anxious I can call Jamie and she knows exactly what to say.”

At the same time, she noted that aspects of the transition have been slightly easier for her, since she’d often had long hair and worn feminine clothing throughout her teenage years, whereas Jamie did not.

“Jamie has always been the more confident one but at the moment her anxiety is through the roof because leaving the house as a woman is new and it is hard,” she said.

Still, they emphasized how great it feels to finally be themselves.

“Last summer I did a lot of thinking about where I want my life to go… I’m transgender. I’m a woman on the inside, unfortunately my outside doesn’t match,” Jamie said.

“I’ve been going through a really hard time trying to accept it and come to terms with it but I’ve been so unhappy for so long, and now that I’ve finally come out I feel so good.”

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2016-05-27T06:11:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/a-day-in-may-where-the-irish-people-changed-everythingA Day in May where the Irish people changed everything2016-05-23T03:38:15-04:00
LGBT Irish people he met on the Irish marriage equality campaign trail, the author has created an instant classic, a snapshot of Ireland on the cusp of momentous social change, and a soon to be historic document describing their hopes and fears in the lead up to the vote. It's the perfect gift to celebrate the referendum’s first birthday.

“After all the scenes of joy at Dublin Castle on May 23 last year someone said to me, ‘Listen you should go back and talk to all the people you interviewed before the count,’” Bird tells the Irish Voice.

“So I did all the research myself before I went looking for a publisher. I realized early on that this would be an important story to put on record.”

With terrific timing Bird, who had retired from RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster, in 2013, had finally found himself free to campaign on any issue that interested him, so in the run up to the referendum he traveled through cities, towns and villages interviewing ordinary LGBT Irish people about their lives and their dreams for the future in the lead up to the vote.

He had, he freely admits, been in no hurry to wrap himself up in any idealistic crusade. After four decades of continuous work with RTE, including a stint as Washington, D.C. correspondent, his instinct to stay above the fray was hardwired. But something shocking happened in the lead up to the referendum that changed his approach to the issue.

Bride Rosney, a longtime friend and colleague at RTE, asked Bird to chair a meeting for a group being formed to campaign for a yes vote in the marriage equality referendum. When he said yes he was taken aback by the reaction of one of his close friends, a reaction that was shared with him soon after.

“Will people not think Charlie is gay?” the person asked another acquaintance, suggesting that merely by participating a cloud of suspicion would now hang over the heterosexual broadcaster in the public's mind (Bird married his long term partner Claire Mould in Dublin this week).

That kind of blinkered us vs. them thinking, where just to take a supportive position was to fall under suspicion yourself, made him realize that attitudes needed to change. He took to the road.

“In Ballinsloe, the heart of rural Ireland, I watched a 72-year-old man stand up at a campaign event and say that he had only come out a year earlier at 71. To be a gay man of his age in rural Ireland for over 71 years and never to tell anyone about it? I just found it so moving that the marriage referendum provided him with the inspiration to stand up and tell his story,” Bird said.

The stories in the book belong to people Bird met on the road, whom he met by word of mouth, since the vast majority of the 52 people in the book are not well known.

“The majority of them have never in their lives spoken publicly to anybody about their sexuality. It was a very tough journey both for me and for them sitting in a room with a tape recorder.”

Bird filmed many of the interviews because a play based on the book is planned. He wants the actors to see the people whose stories they would be telling.

“There they sat in the room with me telling the most intimate of details, things they may not have spoken to another person before,” Bird recalled.

“In at least half of them we laughed and we cried together and it became a really emotional journey for me. It was probably one of the most moving experiences I have ever had in my life doing this book.”

Bird knows that some will ask why he got so involved.

“Look, I'm straight, but here was I going on this journey, and I can't understand what it must be like to have to continually come out. As writer Colm Toibin says in the introduction, ‘These stories make it clear that being gay in Ireland is perhaps a more essential part of Irish history and Irish reality than anyone was aware.’”

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2016-05-23T02:08:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/lgbt-arts-festival-for-irish-arts-center-in-new-yorkLGBT arts festival for Irish Arts Center, in New York2016-05-17T04:57:43-04:00
Craic Fest, the long running festival of the best of Irish films and music in Manhattan, hosts a popular Irish Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in partnership with the Irish Arts Center, and this will be its sixth successful year of operation.

This year's CGLFF is scheduled for Saturday, May 21 beginning at 6 p.m. at the Irish Arts Center. It will be held in conjunction with the Gaze LGBT Film Festival from Dublin.

The special filmmaker guest this year is the award winning Dublin-based director Barry Dignam, director of Dream Kitchen and Chicken. He will participate in an audience discussion and two of his short films will be screened on the night.

Dignam studied drama at Trinity College and film at the National Film School of Ireland, and his films have been presented in official selection at over 150 international film festivals where they have won numerous awards, including nominations for a Palme d'Or at Cannes and a Berlin Bear.

Last year Dignam and playwright Gary Duggan worked together on the screenplay of Duggan's hit play Monged about Dublin's drugs and dance music underworld. The film premiered at the 2015 Galway Film Fleadh.

On May 21, almost a year to the day after the historic Irish marriage referendum, Dignam will participate in a lively discussion about the challenges and triumphs of 100 years of queer Ireland.

Dignam and his longtime partner Hugh Walsh were one of the first Irish couples to enter into civil partnership in Ireland and the first to do so after the mandatory (at the time) three month wait.

By 2011 the pair had waited 17 years to formalize their commitment to each other in the eyes of the state. “When we met it was actually illegal to be gay in Ireland,” Dignam told the press at the time of his civil partnership.

By 2016, the centenary of the Easter Rising, they and every other gay couple in the country can now legally tie the knot in the eyes of the law (churches are of course still another matter).

The panel will discuss the epic journey that Irish LGBT citizens have made from criminality, invisibility and oppression to full equality, reflecting on many of the lessons learned and the path ahead.

Terence Mulligan festival producer told the Irish Voice, “We are delighted to be working with the Irish Arts Center and excited that Barry Dignam can attend as well!”

On the night audiences will have the rare chance to catch Dignam's terrific first movie Dream Kitchen, filmed and also set in Dublin. It follows a callow teenager as he fantasizes about how he'll come out to his less than supportive parents.

The gap between alluring day dreams and cold hard reality is one that will be familiar to any Irish gay person, and Dignam knows how to make a point and get a laugh at the same time.

In Chicken, another gay themed short by the Dublin-based director, we meet Mick and Kev, two recognizably bored Irish teens who, for a test of courage, play a knife game which involves stabbing a knife between their outstretched fingers at an ever-faster rate (teens are known for their great wisdom, lets face it).

In a magnanimous gesture of support Mick puts his hand over Kev's in order to shield his hand from the worst of an injury if it should it occur, and wouldn't you know it, sparks begin to fly.

The CGLFF is part of the year-long Irish heritage celebration in New York, supported by the Cultural Immigrant Initiative and the Irish Caucus (City Council of New York).

The night kicks off with a pre-reception at 6 p.m. presented by Stella Artois and Boru Vodka. The films run from 7:30-9 p.m. The after screening reception is from 9-10:30 p.m. The film program will be a combination of short documentaries and live action comedy shorts.

You must RSVP to attend to the411@thecraicfest.com. For further information or to attend call 917-373-6735 or visit www.thecraicfest.com.

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2016-05-17T02:12:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/guns-not-the-transgendered-are-the-real-threat-to-americas-childrenGuns, not the transgendered, are the real threat to America’s children2016-05-17T12:11:30-04:00
transgender woman in a restroom anywhere in America.

Ever.

But to hear Governor of North Carolina Pat McCrory or Lt. Governor of Texas Dan Patrick tell it, America's restrooms are suddenly seething hotbeds of transgender molestation, or if they're not they soon will be, though they can't point to a single example in the history of the United States.

Nor has there been one example, despite all the dire warnings from these two partisan blowhards, of a man using the “but I'm really a transgender women” argument to gain access to a women's locker room or to a women's bathroom, or to indulge in illegal conduct, in any of the hundreds of jurisdictions in the nation that have expanded legal protections to transgender people.

So the question is are the governors talking facts here or urban legends?

Why, if they're making these arguments, can't conservatives be consistent?

It's increasingly clear to most observers that conservative legislators don't believe that these bathroom bills will work any more than they believe gun restrictions bills will work. How do I know this? Because they have seen the schoolroom full of dead children at Newtown, CT and failed to act, or even appear to act. Where was all their moral outrage then?

In the aftermath of that unspeakable horror they marched in lockstep, telling us that greater gun restrictions could not have prevented it from happening. Nothing could have prevented it. No need for legislation.

There was no dramatic all-night debate. There was no hurried bill-crafting carried on into in the wee hours. There were no round the clock TV debates.

There was only silence. Total, abject, craven silence.

If the conservatives in these states actually cared about children they would tackle the real threat that's attacking and killing them, and it's not from transgender people.

An investigation of child and youth deaths in America between 2002 and 2012 discovered that at least 28,000 children and teenagers 19-years-old or younger were killed with guns.

28,000 children and teenagers. Where were our outraged legislators then?

Meanwhile it’s increasingly obvious that these so-called bathroom bills are really just a semi-covert operation by the Christian right, targeting some of the most vulnerable people in the nation, in a desperate last ditch attempt to harpoon the bigger prize, LGBT equality. But that train has left the station.

Ask governor McCrory or Patrick how many transgender people they have taken the views of – or ever spoken to in their lives – and they can probably count them on one hand, if at all.

Where there is no debate there is no wisdom, hence these heinous, unenforceable and unconstitutional bills.

No one in the governor's mansions in North Carolina or Tennessee or Texas is asking how much danger these bathroom bills have placed transgender people in. They should start.

No one is asking exactly how these sex-checking bathroom bills will be enforced. They should start.

Over 250 organizations that work with the victims of sexual violence (including the North Carolina state coalition) recently signed a statement in opposition to the state bathroom bill, saying that it only promotes violence against transgender people and does nothing to protect women or girls.

Segregationists in the 1960's used to say allowing white and black people to mix freely would result in black men sexually assaulting white women. They used to say that integrating bathrooms would result in black women giving white women diseases and STD's. These claims are being echoed again in 2016, this time against trans people in ways that threaten their dignity and ultimately their lives.

Last November, Congress held the first-ever forum on violence against transgender people. They had good reason to, in 2013 a staggering 72% of hate crime murders in the United States were of transgender women.

Nearly 80% of trans people have reported experiencing serious verbal or physical harassment at school. Most shocking of all, the number of transgender people murdered in the U.S. last year was the highest in U.S. history.

What is increasingly obvious is that McCrory and Patrick et al have picked the most easily maligned and marginalized community in America as sock puppets to score bigger political points on the national stage. Pariah’s always make the best pinatas.

But the truth – and the growing transgender murder statistics bear this out – is that transgendered people have always had much more to fear from the rest of us than we ever did from them.

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2016-05-17T02:09:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/first-transgender-candidate-ellen-murray-hopes-to-win-north-seatFirst transgender candidate Ellen Murray hopes to win North seat2016-04-26T11:50:47-04:00
Meet Ellen Murray, the 22-year-old Green Party candidate for West Belfast in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections, and the latest and most striking example of how the legacy of the peace process is transforming the political debate there.

Born in the heart of republican West Belfast, Murray was just two years old when the IRA ceasefire was announced. On May 5 she will make history as the first transgender candidate to stand in an election north or south of the Irish border.

It’s a distinction that’s not lost on the young woman who, because she lives in the only part of the UK to resist marriage equality for LGBT couples, must watch many of her legal rights appear or vanish as she crosses the border from Northern Ireland to the Republic (same-sex marriage is not legal in Northern Ireland, which also grants significantly fewer rights to its transgender citizens).

Nevertheless, it’s a measure of the North’s status as a society in transition itself that its calcified political debates are rapidly widening from the usual sectarian headcounts.

“The surprise is that I'm encountering widespread support,” Mullen tells IrishCentral. “It's a very risky thing to put my hat in the ring and I was expecting a lot of pushback and retaliation. But the support's been very encouraging. The conversations that I'm having most are with people from my own LGBT community and they're very enthusiastic.

“In terms of the wider population I think there's something about interesting candidates you don't expect to be running here that captures people's attention somewhat. I've had a lot of discussions where I talk to people and then they look me up on Twitter. It's not a novelty. It's interesting for people to see the diversity of candidates.”

Observers suggest that the cracks in the frozen sea of Northern Ireland’s politics that have appeared since the start of the peace process could soon become a flood.

They blame the internet. Social media is leading an information revolution that even Northern Ireland, one of the most politically hidebound states in Europe, cannot withstand.

Thanks to sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, young and traditionally disenfranchised voters are finding their own voices for the first time, and more and more of them are demanding to be heard, perhaps especially in working class communities, where diversity has been reflexively suppressed for decades.

It turns out that's a win for the state. Hyper-articulate and uncommonly focused on her manifesto, which comes from her lived experience, Murray makes for an impressive first time candidate.

“I got involved in politics as soon as I came out as trans in 2013 because I was finding that the health services I needed to get access to were completely inaccessible,” she explains. “They weren't taking any new patients and I was being told to wait forever for an appointment.”

Murray took up the issue with her local MLA's at Stormont, which led to two and a half years of healthcare advocacy work with local government departments to promote access to services for young trans people initially, then people of all ages.

“When I was working with Stormont there seemed to be many ways in which things could be changed for the better and I just got hooked on that sort of community work.”

To her surprise, Murray found support for her work from all parties, but getting public support is still very difficult she admits. “There are good individuals in all of the parties. The big unionist parties are quite publicly anti-LGBT, so when it comes party policy and getting candidates to commit to issues publicly that is tricky. There is very little cultural competency around trans and non-binary (gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine) people within politics here.”

Murray adds that if elected she is very conscious of the mountain she will have to climb. “There's only a small handful of individuals in general – never mind parties – in Northern Ireland that have a real grasp of legislation affecting trans issues or even women's issues generally.”

Ellen Murray- 22 year old Irish trans woman who is the first person to run in a northern Irish election pic.twitter.com/aJJRNjKCdi

But even people who disagree with her politics seem to be glad that she's running, she says. “Those conversations are starting to happen and space is being made for them to. It's a positive thing and it's been great.”

Meanwhile, Murray is appalled by the hysterical “bathroom predator” bills that are being pushed in some states in the U.S. and believes that North Carolina's HB2 bill is exactly the kind of fear-mongering legislation that she would stand against at home.

“I am fearful for a lot of my trans friends who live in the south and in the U.S. generally. I'm seeing a lot of them really struggling at the moment. I have a fairly extensive network of trans folk I have known online for years now and they're worried, they're stressed, they aren't able to access the same public services and integrate into society in the ways that they were. They're deeply concerned about the fear and the backlash that is happening against them.

“Bathroom bills are only discussed in fringe circles over here and there are a few candidates – the kind who want to outlaw feminism and rock music – who have it on their manifestoes. Hopefully they won't get too far."

Completely non-evidence based claims made against trans people are used to justify violence and the policing of people's genders in public, Murray says. That can lead to social isolation and to suicide. “The US trans hotline has seen a doubling of calls since HB2 (North Carolina's so-called bathroom bill) was passed. That's appalling.”

Although the marriage equality referendum in the Republic had a successful outcome last year, there was also a tenfold increase in people being referred to LGBT support she says.

“The vitriol in the media and the public backlash at times deeply affected people. With HB2 that's being replicated in the States at the moment and we're talking about one of the most vulnerable communities to self harm and suicide and other risk behaviors and this is not in any way safe for that community.”

Representation is Murray's watchword. As a candidate she wants to be a voice for anyone who feels overlooked or underserved by the traditional parities.

“I think that makeup of the Northern Assembly has to reflect the makeup of the population. We currently have zero out LGBT MLA's and we're very unlikely to get representative in the Assembly going forward. We need to have a conversation about making our politics more representative.

“Until we have a proper balance of demographics within our legislature we won't be making decisions that are well informed. You can do all the consultation work that you want, but until the people making the decisions have the lived experience they will not be making good decisions.”

If elected on May 5 Murray will be an extraordinary sign of things to come. After all, Northern Ireland's politics used to exasperate even the habitually unflappable Winston Churchill.

After World War I had shaken Europe to its foundations he was depressed to realize that as “the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.”

“The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world,” he wrote.

We’re all changed utterly, he wrote, but they haven’t changed a jot. What the hell is wrong with these people, he might have added.

Representation appears to have been the answer. “The makeup of Stormont simply needs to change,” Murray says. On May 5 she intends to deliver that message by standing in West Belfast.

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2016-04-26T02:27:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/irish-revolutions-are-a-drag-from-panti-to-1916Irish revolutions are a drag: from Panti to 19162016-04-24T05:11:47-04:00
she’s in Time’s top 100 most influential people) but she was not the first.

One cross dresser actually manned the burning battlements of the Easter Rising. Yes you read that right, no you were not taught this in school.

In fact this is probably the first you have ever heard about it, but it’s no less true.

In a recent interview with The New York Times former sanitation worker turned master's degree student Ed Shevlin (currently studying Irish and Irish-American Studies at New York University) spoke of fellow Far Rockaway man John "The Yank" Kilgallon, who as a young man attended a Dublin boarding school and ended up fighting in the Rising.

His worried father sent Kilgallon, a bit of a Jack the Lad, to St. Enda’s school in Dublin after a lawsuit for joyriding.

The plan was to keep him out of trouble but in fact he ended up with every other St. Enda’s student in the unit that stormed the General Post Office, which became the rebel’s headquarters.

Over the course of the next few days, between the gunfire and the explosions, Kilgallon managed to break into the nearby wax museum and steal a costume of Queen Elizabeth I.

He returned to the battle wearing it. It seems even Irish revolutions are habitually disrespectful.

“Here’s this young soldier mocking the queen during the chaotic battle,” Shevlin told the Times, adding that “this Kilgallon kid” was a bit of a wild man, perhaps because of his Rockaways roots.

“It’s the sea air out here,” he said. “I got it too. I’m out of my bird.”

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2016-04-22T08:07:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/pope-francis-battling-hardliners-as-new-joy-of-love-omits-gay-couplesPope Francis battles hardliners as new “Joy of Love” omits gays, divorcees2016-04-09T06:35:34-04:00
Can there be any doubt now that Pope Francis wants the Church to be responsive to social reality, to life as it is lived by the world’s estimated 1.2 billion Catholics?

The problem is that the social reality, the life as it is lived in this 236 page document titled Amoris Laetitia, or “the Joy of Love” belongs to the faded pre-Age of Aquarius world of 1963, not to 2016.

Nevertheless, supporters and critics will parse this document this week for clues about where Francis will lead the church, reminding me of the way nationalists and unionists used to parse new political declarations in hardest years of the peace process in Ireland.

It is abundantly clear now that Francis wants a political settlement, one that addresses the new realities of the faithful, and puts the conflicts of the past to rest.

But it is equally clear that hardliners behind the scenes want to retain the right to determine who’s in and who’s out, and ensure the power behind the papal throne still speaks with the loudest voice.

Francis may wish to throw open the church’s doors to the tens of millions of Catholics who feel excluded by church doctrine, but that gesture would convulse his senior clerics.

Conservative voices have loudly demanded there be no change in the church’s teaching on social issues and in this new document they have gotten what they wanted, because the pope is confined to simply calling for a change in the church’s tone and emphasis, not a change in the rules. Be much nicer to the fallen is the message, essentially.

I’m over being disappointed by this. I didn’t expect the pope to change church doctrine to stop denigrating the dignity, humanity and worth of gay people, or divorcees, or single mothers. Decades ago I and almost every other Irish gay person I know reconciled ourselves to the fact that Catholicism will keep a cold house (and church) for the like of us.

So to call for a change in tone without a change of doctrine is next to meaningless. In an ancient and deeply reactionary organization like the church, where every change in tone is obsessively policed, the glacial slowness of its response to modern life will probably do nothing to halt its increasing isolation.

Francis understands, more than any pope in modern times, that the church starts by casting out sinners and ends by being cast out itself, because that is always the fate of the holier than thou.

It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. This document, with its focus on heterosexual unions and its explicit rejection of gay ones, divides without conquering. Gay unions are still shown the door whilst heterosexual ones (as long as they are still in their first marriage) are shown salvation. What fomer Irish president Mary McAleese wisely called "the architecture of homophobia" still stands.

We should not wonder at this. In the Vatican there are countless old theologians who spend their days pondering urgent questions like how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

Pope Emeritus Benedict was one such theoretician. Just to look at him was to realize he had probably not spent an hour ministering to ordinary Catholics in the real world since the time of Pope Pius XII. Just to look at him was to know why half the U.S. adults raised Catholic have left the church.

If this were a business model rather than a religion you would say it was self-defeating. We can conclude that Amoris Laetitia, or “the Joy of Love,” is a flawed document because it diagnoses the problem without administering a cure.

Do not, Francis writes, wield “moral laws” like a weapon. But you cannot leave a cache of divisive spiritual weapons lying around and expect that clerics will resist the temptation to use them.

If Francis genuinely thinks asking the clergy to play nicer whilst refusing to decommission the theology they use to exclude millions will work, he should reflect on the hard lessons of the Irish peace process.

In Ireland we learned that no one wants to decommission until everyone decommissions. That meant that sometimes an act of transformative courage was required of those in power, to move the process forward.

Amoris Laetitia, or “the Joy of Love,” is a gesture, but not an act of courage. The times – and the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics – deserved more. For millions of second tier Catholics there’s still no room at the inn, the altar or the chapel.

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2016-04-09T06:59:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/panti-bliss-and-the-ancient-order-of-hibernians-celebrate-the-easter-risingPanti Bliss and the Ancient Order of Hibernians celebrate the Easter Rising2016-09-12T10:11:57-04:00
Dublin: Panti Bliss and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, America’s largest Irish group, celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising together in one room last night and both symbolized how far Ireland and Irish America have come.

Panti Bliss drag queen, AKA Rory O’Neill, showed up for the after party at the Little Museum off Stephen’s Green among a hundred or so Irish Americans who had earlier taken part in a welcome ceremony at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin attended by Minister Charlie Flanagan among others.

When Panti, who looked about 6 foot 3 in high heels, strutted into the Little Museum off Stephen's Green she was immediately the star of the show.

But she is about much more than just a drag queen. She had been a leading light in the marriage equality movement and was a key figure in helping get same sex marriage passed in 2015.

Since then she has gone from obscurity to fame, her latest feat is being nominated for the Time 100 most influential people. It was the gay proclamation for Irish LGBT's as much as the Easter Proclamation was the rebel’s calling card.

Her speech about homophobia and gay rights delivered from th stage of the Abbey Theater in 2014 was one of modern Ireland’s finest moments as a taboo topic was suddenly thrown open, As Joe.ie wrote.

"Accidental and occasional gay rights activist" Rory O'Neill AKA Panti Bliss over the weekend delivered an incredibly impassioned and powerful post-show oration at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, as she spoke about prejudice and homophobia in the aftermath of the RTÉ controversy surrounding her recent appearance on The Saturday Night Show.

More and more we have to recognize that right to same sex marriage vote on May 22nd 2015 was a watershed for Ireland, the moment when it pivoted towards the 21st century and left an oppressive past behind. 62 per cent of the people voted yes, an extraordinary occurrence given the conservative nature of the country for decades. No other country has passed equal marriage by universal referendum.

Panti became the symbol of that astonishing moment waving to the ecstatic crowds in Dublin Castle, and she has since been feted in New York, Australia and around the world,

And give thought in a different to the men and women of the AOH who have come from America in large numbers for this centenary including national president Brendan Moore.

Since its foundation in 1836 it has been steadfast in Ireland's cause down through the anti Catholic, Know-Nothing years and stood with the beleaguered Northern minority during the Troubles when it was neither popular or approved. They have endured when many other groups have faded and last night was a thank you to them also.

On Saturday night at the impressive function at the Department of Foreign Affairs for overseas pilgrims to the shrine of 1916, it was the AOH president Brendan Moore who injected the Irish American dimension, reading the proclamations from Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York among others relaying the pride that all Americans felt in the Easter 1916 Rising and how inspirational it had become to them.

So Panti and the AOH did it their way. I believe the men of 1916 dreamers, scholars, doers, revolutionaries, would have sided with both of them for creating a better and more inclusive Irish experience for everyone alive.

Dublin this weekend of the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising is certainly interesting.

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2016-03-27T05:40:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/all-pride-and-no-prejudice-at-new-yorks-st-patricks-day-paradeAll pride and no prejudice at New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade2016-03-24T06:58:12-04:00
Such was the marching for the first time of the Lavender and Green group in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York. It was a battle that had consumed 25 years, dire pronouncements of Armageddon, years of protests and legal challenges.

It was also the go to evergreen story every year for the media of the intolerant Irish refusing to let gays march with their own banner, with the usual pictures of gay groups protesting and various politicians boycotting, like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

What the former parade organizers never realized was that some traditions, such as slavery, discrimination and exploitation, are better to left die.

When Cardinal Timothy Dolan, to his enormous credit, accepted the parade grand marshal role last year, knowing there was an NBC gay group marching for the first time, the writing was on the wall.

The old time religion still held for some parade leaders however, cardinal or no cardinal. It was like a horse and cart trying to keep up a Model T Ford. All had changed.

The parade board led by Dr. John Lahey, who was elected last June, realized quickly the old days were done and implemented a policy allowing Lavender and Green, an Irish group that has paid its dues over many years, to march.

In this decision they were backed by de Blasio, the entire New York City Council and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Foundation, a savvy group of Irish American business leaders who realized the damage the old parade antics were doing to the Irish image.

Thus it was on a sparkling March 17 that one of the biggest crowds in memory lined the sidewalks as hundreds of thousands marched up Fifth Avenue.

There was not a single incident reported, the Lavender and Green marchers were all in high spirits and were met with applause and friendliness all the way up the avenue.

A damn burst of emotion was let loose among those who sought only the right to be treated equally. The Supreme Court has ruled it should be so, and now the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York has followed suit.

The historic day looked no different to any other parade and the naysayer nabobs of negativism were proven utterly wrong.

There is still talk of the ancient regime somehow returning after a court case set to be heard in the Bronx next week. That would be akin to the return of spear carriers after tanks had been invented.

My strong advice to them is to let it go. King Canute turning back the waves comes to mind.

The naysayers need to slip away or stay and be part of the new dispensation. The Irish community is a far more tolerant and accepted community as a result of this move.

Don’t take my word for it, talk to the millions at the parade and the fine day had by all. The proof is in the pride, joy and tolerance of an entire community and the great parade leadership now in place.

Long may it be so.

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2016-03-24T06:53:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/galway-1989-the-cold-condescension-of-when-we-knew-no-betterGalway 1989 – the cold condescension of when we knew no better2016-03-28T05:39:06-04:00
Passing though the old courtyard, I was half expecting someone to walk up and demand to see my student card. You're an imposter, get out of here, I imagined they'd say.

But no one looked twice at me. It was raining. I walked through the old buildings, which at that time looked down at heel, until I found a long corridor that smelled of ammonia, beer and cigarette smoke.

I had been living in the city of the tribes for two months and I was still finding my feet, so I wasn't there to discuss enrolling that day. In fact I was involved in a far trickier business. I was in search of my adult life.

I had reached the right door. Room 202, it read. GAY/LES SOC said a handwritten sign beneath the printed number.

I opened the door. To any passersby I was simply entering a room, but to myself I was a making a powerful public declaration.

I'm here because this is where I am going, my entry spelled out. This is really the door to my future. I half expected to hear a trumpet blast.

In fact there was no one there at all. I looked around, consulted my watch, and sat down.

I was five minutes early for my scheduled meeting. I took a seat. After a little while I heard footsteps approaching. Then the door that I had entered through minutes earlier swung wide open and a man in his late twenties looked around and said my name.

“Are you Cahir,” he asked? He pronounced it Care.

I said I was Cahir. I pronounced it Kah-hir. Our north south provenances had already revealed themselves.

He wrinkled his nose. I saw he was what we in those days called a mature student.

He walked right past me to a large desk in the middle of the room which he threw himself into like a CEO waiting to dictate a letter to his secretary. He didn't look at me directly as he spoke.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

It was a good question. I immediately thought of a Smiths song lyric: “Well, when you want to live how do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?”

At the risk of sounding glib I didn't say this, however. instead I simply told him the first thing I knew about myself.

“I'm from Donegal,” I said.

He guffawed. “So you're from the a**hole of nowhere,” he snorted.

I was very fond of Donegal. This dismissive perspective was news to me.

In return I asked him where he was from and he replied Athlone. I wondered if he thought he had one over on me.

“What brings you here?” he finally asked.

I replied that although it was a city Galway didn't have a gay bar, or a gay cafe, or a gay anything.

“This is only place in town where people can meet,” I told him. Or at least so I read.

“Do you actually have meetings,” I asked? “Who comes to them? Could I come too?”

For the first time he looked directly at me.

“If you want to,” he said cooly, letting his tone say no instead.

A strained silence descended. I felt dismissed. I felt as though I had driven a stolen car in the wrong direction and had arrived somewhere I hadn't anticipated.

It can be hard to remember now, but in the Ireland of 1989 there weren't many gay people who were prepared to have an open and honest conversation about who they were and what they wanted.

I was. But before I had even got started this man was dropping a portcullis over my path.

It turned out that I was from the wrong place. I had the wrong accent. From the wrong town.

For all I knew I was wearing the wrong shoes (mine were size 10 Doc Martens; his were ribbed blue leather loafers over noticeably stubby feet).

He gave me a look of immense impatience. In that moment I finally took him in.

He was somewhere between 29 and 35. He looked uncomfortable in his skin. He looked unhappy.

I had seen men and women like this before. People who seemed always on the verge of laughing or shouting. People who might have been happier once but that moment had clearly passed. People who hadn't grown up.

Now he was tapping one foot from side rapidly to convey that his disinterest. This discussion was at an end, his manner said.

Later it would seem to me the country was full of such people. People who had turned inward because they had looked out without a connection for too long.

What I needed, what I had come in search of, was very thin on the ground in Ireland in 1989: a little human honesty and connection. But he could not give it to me because he could not find it himself.

Instead I simply got what people knew how to give then, what so many young people were given at the time: short shrift. Condescension. The door.

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2016-03-23T06:45:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/culture/community/history-made-as-irish-lgbt-group-marches-on-fifth-avenueHistory made as Irish LGBT group marches on Fifth Avenue2016-03-18T13:05:58-04:00
Brendan Fay, Lavender and Green’s co-founder and driving force, cried tears of joy. New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm, marching in his first St. Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue, was also awestruck. Ditto fellow Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, a grandchild of Co. Wexford who had never marched in the world’s most famous Irish parade before because it excluded an Irish LGBT group.

The Lavender and Green banner, an official part of the parade for the first time, attracted a crush of media and plenty of cheers from the remaining spectators on Fifth Avenue when the 300-strong marching unit stepped off, after 25 years of protests and many arrests over the lack of inclusion.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose boycott of the parade during his previous two years as mayor unquestionably prompted the compromise that green-lighted Lavender and Green’s admittance, marched the entire parade route with the first Irish LGBT group in the march. He was joined by his wife Chirlane McCray and a host of other long-standing activists, including former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and her father Larry, LGBT icon Edie Windsor, and Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy, the beloved co-founder of the Lavender and Green Alliance. De Blasio had marched in the parade earlier in the day with both the NYPD and FDNY contingents.

“It’s everything I expected and more,” said Fay, who has spent past parades protesting Irish LGBT exclusion – and often being arrested for such.

Walsh D’Arcy said she was sure the day would come when inclusivity reigned on Fifth Avenue, but the reality was “amazing” to take in.

“We are thankful and grateful and so proud. This is how it should be,” she said.

De Blasio and his wife arrived at the Lavender and Green gathering on West 48th Street not long before the group stepped off. The marchers, all of whom sported lavender and green sashes, were in a joyous mood, and happy to be done with the decades of protest which saw them hold banners along Fifth Avenue when the parade reached the 57th Street.

The chairman of the parade’s board of directors, Quinnipiac University President Dr. John Lahey, welcomed Lavender and Green at the start of their march, and also greeted the group, along with the parade’s long-time executive secretary and logistics head Hilary Beirne, at the 62nd Street grandstand.

Lahey has championed the inclusion of an Irish LGBT group in the parade, and has praised the 2016 march as being the “most inclusive” ever.

(The Irish Voice newspaper will have a comprehensive report next Wednesday on the Lavender and Green debut on Fifth Avenue, and interviews with the group’s supporters.)

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2016-03-18T08:26:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/st-patricks-day-parade-in-new-york-becomes-one-nation-once-againSt. Patrick’s Day parade in New York becomes one nation once again2016-03-18T11:52:47-04:00
St. Patrick’s Day: The canyons of Manhattan sparkled in the morning sun, the muffled drumbeats and whistles of pipe and drum bands were everywhere.

On the sidewalks a sea of green enveloped the Manhattan horizon as far as the eyes could see. I found myself humming the Beatles lyrics, “Sky of blue and sea of green” from "Yellow Submarine."

Everyone seemed surrounded by friends at this Celtic feast of the arrival of spring, which was the feast of Imbolc in Celtic mythology, the time of the year when darkness departed and the sun began its merry climb across the sky and winter was banished and young lovers thrived.

Two million showed up to recreate our heritage and salute our springtime in the greatest city in the world in the greatest country on the globe in the finest planet in the Milky Way.

On the way to the parade the kids were joyous, boys and girls mingling hands and mingling glances while the world was spinning yet another St. Patrick’s Day from Darwin to Dublin, Nepal to New York.

It’s at times like this you miss the old crowd, the Paul O'Dwyer’s and the Frank Durcan's who gave their everything for the Irish in the city but never marched because of the old exclusionary rules. Yet they did more for the Irish than a thousand grand Poohbahs of the parade who sought to hold on to the grimy grip they had on the future.

Then this year the cascade broke and enlightened men and women took over. Suddenly the parade was inclusive again, like a patient recovering it never looked better than this fine March morning.

Let us name some on that role of honor: John Lahey, Hilary Beirne, Sean Lane, Frank Comerford... The list could go on and on, but let us thank them for restoring the good name of inclusivity in the same sentence as Irish.

It would not be the parade but for some skullduggery. This time it was an Italian stand-off over who would steal a march first – the governor or the mayor. Andrew Cuomo grabbed the initiative and, with Mayor de Blasio vainly watching, Cuomo grabbed the showtime lead spot where he wasn’t supposed to be and set off a furious pace leading the Fighting 69th, the greatest Irish regiment of all.

Welcome to New York politics where priorities change in a New York minute. Maybe we’d have had the two Italians haggling like Irish fishwives, but alas De Blasio never caught up.

De Blasio would later make up for his wounded pride and ego by marching with Lavender and Green and we all had to wonder what the fuss was about as we saw a group of Irishmen and women – with the tall mayor towering over everybody – make their way up Fifth.

Would the skies part and thunderbolt appear? Would St. Patrick float down from heaven wagging a finger at this very ordinary group of citizens who happened to be gay where others happen to be straight?

Who knew?

We looked in vain for signs of the horsemen of the apocalypse, but there was only a yellow orb in the sky, positively identified as the sun by several parade goers. It blazed away as they walked up Fifth.

Not long before them the man who was deposed as parade chairman, John Dunleavy, marched with the United Irish Counties and was embraced by the Cardinal at the steps of St Patrick's Cathedral.

It was surely the time to let bygones be bygones and let the old exclusionary ways go and the Irish America of yesteryear fade.

Certainly everything yesterday pointed to the most successful march in years, if not decades.

My two most emotional moments, while watching later from the beautifully appointed American Irish Historical Society, were the appearance of legendary and heroic policeman Steve McDonald and the firemen with their 349 flags remembering their fallen brethren of 9/11.

That is what the parade is about – honoring heroes amid the canyons of New York.

We could do it unencumbered by any other issues yesterday.

We were a united nation once again. Long may it stay that way.

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2016-03-18T05:10:00-04:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/history-will-be-made-at-the-255th-nyc-patricks-parade-up-fifthHistory will be made at the 255th NYC Patrick’s Parade up Fifth2016-03-17T06:21:17-04:00
St. Patrick’s Day Foundation dinner at the New York Athletic Club on Wednesday night when the move of the parade into the 21st century became official.

A parade that looked on the verge of extinction, with sponsors and many leading Irish American running for the hills, has come back from the dead and looks like becoming the single greatest institution in the Irish community in America once again.

The battle with the old guard, who were driving the parade over a cliff, has been won by men like Doctor John Lahey, the Chairman of the parade and men like Hilary Beirne and Sean Lane the founders of the St. Patrick’s Day foundation with the assistance of the Irish government and, crucially, Cardinal Timothy Dolan who blessed the compromise and working plan.

The new parade inclusiveness, allowing Irish LGBT to march, was baptized in style on Wednesday night by Grand Marshal George Mitchell, who delivered a speech that surely surpassed everyone that came before in the history of the parade.

Mitchell, the Irish peace process savior and once, as Senate Majority Leader, four heart beats from the presidency, is not normally an emotional man but he revealed just what his Irish heritage meant to him amid a packed room hanging on every word.

In the broader context he talked about the militias in his native Maine set up to stop the Irish coming over the Maine border and then the hate that those who came anyway faced at a time when “No Irish Need Apply” signs were rampant.

Turning to his own family, Mitchell’s father, son of an Irish immigrant, was an orphan adopted by an older Maine couple who grew up knowing little of his roots.

Indeed, his father only got a basic education and worked as a school janitor most of his life. His mother, a Lebanese immigrant, was illiterate.

Mitchell wonderfully caught the moment of the greatness of America, where he and his siblings all went to college and he went on to become one of the pre-eminent politicians in the United States, a man who turned down the Supreme Court when Bill Clinton offered it and most importantly for that poor orphaned boy who was his father, bringing peace to his ancestral homeland.

Mitchell spoke of walking the streets, hearing the accents, getting to know people who knew of his long ago family and he felt closer than ever to his roots.

It seems Mitchell was predestined to help Ireland.

At the event was Brendan Fay, founder of the Lavender and Green group and a devout Catholic who has persevered with dignity and grace for over 20 years and has finally been rewarded as well as Queens politician Danny Dromm who openly wept when the gay groups were allowed in the parade.

The 255th annual parade will rightly be one for the history books and a great example of what enlightened thinking can achieve. Success will have many fathers this St.Patrick's Day, a united parade for the first time in decades, a Grand Marshal who is the grandest of them all arguably and an Irish spirit that found a way, both through making peace in Ireland and solving the parade dilemma.

Was it for this that Pearse, Connelly et al braved English rifles? Well yes actually, if you believe the revolutionary leaders were serious about all that business of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally.”

Besides, in their military green historic costumes, these two are hilarious and tailor made for TV.

White, a hairdresser, reportedly planned the whole wedding himself, keeping it a secret from his husband Villalobos, a dancer. He told the press that he chose the 1916 theme to underline just how far Ireland has really come since its historic same sex marriage vote in May last year.

“What better way to celebrate being Irish than having an Easter Rising themed wedding?” he told the Irish Mirror.

“I probably would’ve been burnt at the stake 100 years ago for being gay so it’s amazing now that two men can stand up and tell the world they love each other and legally get married here.”

This month marks the centenary of the 1916 revolutionary Rising, when Irish forces struck what would become a decisive blow against British oppression. It’s also almost a year after the historic marriage referendum.

That revolutionary Irish spirit lives on in this wedding, White suggests.

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2016-03-12T06:29:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/culture/community/tears-prayers-and-joy-at-irish-consulate-as-de-blasio-ready-to-marchTears, prayers and joy at Irish Consulate as De Blasio ready to march2016-03-04T03:59:57-05:00
Thursday was a day of firsts for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: he became the first sitting mayor to visit the Irish Consulate on Park Avenue, and he confirmed that he would march for the first time in this year’s New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

“It’s our nature to embrace and support all people,” de Blasio said at a packed Irish community gathering and press conference at the consulate yesterday afternoon.

The prior exclusion of an Irish gay group from the line of march was a “blemish” on New York, the mayor added.

“Now for the first time,” he said, “the whole Irish community will come together to celebrate.”

Confirming an exclusive report last month from IrishCentral's sister publication the Irish Voice, de Blasio said he will march with members of the city’s uniformed services at the start of the parade, and return later in the day to march with the Lavender and Green Alliance, the Irish gay group that will take part for the first time after 25 years of exclusion.

The mayor paid tribute to two people who weren’t in the room whom he said helped pave the way for an inclusive Fifth Avenue march: Pope Francis and Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

“Since the beginning of his papacy he has sent a mission of inclusion and respect for all,” de Blasio said of the pope. “His message has resonated deeply.”

Dolan and the mayor spoke in a phone call in the hours before the press conference, “and we talked about what this moment meant,” de Blasio said.

“I told him from the bottom of my heart how appreciative I have been. I told him what an honor it would be to stand with him on St. Patrick’s Day.”

The mayor was joined by a number of Irish American community leaders behind the mayoral podium, which was delivered to the consulate for the occasion. Frank McGreal, a member of the parade board of directors which after a leadership change last year voted to lift the ban on an Irish LGBT group, spoke on behalf of the parade and the wish of board members to move forward.

The event turned emotional when a teary-eyed Brendan Fay, co-founder of the Lavender and Green Alliance who from day one has been leading the charge for an all-inclusive parade, took to the podium to thank the parade board for its “miracle of hospitality.”

“It’s been a long and winding road to this inclusion,” said Co. Louth native Fay, who paid tribute to many deceased supporters like Father Mychal Judge, who died on 9/11.

New York City Council Members Daniel Dromm and Jimmy Van Bramer of Queens were equally moved by the turn of events that saw them reflect on their journey from parade-related protests and arrests, to standing in the Irish Consulate talking about their joy at finally being able to march behind an Irish LGBT banner.

Dromm shed tears as he paid tribute to Fay. “To see his struggle over the last 25 years has been incredible. There were many times we wanted to give up and we wondered if we would ever see this day,” he said.

“It’s a day of reconciliation and healing for all of us.”

The press conference was hosted by Irish Consul General Barbara Jones, whose role in helping to bring all sides together to settle the parade dispute was called “crucial” by de Blasio.

“We are here because the mayor has the very best of news for us all. I do want to say that I salute him and welcome his team in a very open-hearted way,” Jones said.

“Today is a coming together that has been happening for weeks in this very room.”

De Blasio took questions from the media after his remarks, and indicated some flexibility over the Department of Education’s controversial decision to schedule parent teacher conferences on St. Patrick’s Day. Last month, attorney Brian O’Dwyer filed a civil rights complaint with the city’s Human Rights Commission on behalf of an Irish American schoolteacher, Frank Schorn, who claims his right to celebrate his religion and Irish American heritage is being violated because of the conference scheduling.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers who also spoke at yesterday’s event, said that Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina “is open” to teachers making other arrangements to meet parents, “and is trying to finalize that.”

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2016-03-04T03:24:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/new-york-mayor-de-blasio-ends-his-ban-on-marching-in-ny-pats-paradeNew York Mayor de Blasio ends his ban on marching in NY Pat’s Parade2016-03-03T04:08:30-05:00
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio will, for the first time ever, march in this year’s New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. He will make it official at a press conference on Thursday, the Irish Consulate in New York.

“The St. Patrick’s Day Parade is a New York City tradition, but for years, Irish LGBT New Yorkers could not show their pride,” Mr. de Blasio told the Associated Press. “Finally, they can celebrate their heritage by marching in a parade that now represents progress and equality.”

This year, more than 300 people will march under the banner of the Lavender and Green Alliance. “Our hearts will be dancing,” said Brendan Fay, the head of the group.

The mayor, who refused to take part in the parade in prior years due to the exclusion of gay Irish groups walking behind an identifying banner, will likely march up Fifth Avenue twice on March 17.

He will join a group that has yet to be determined at the front of the march – traditionally, the mayor has marched with the NYPD -- and return later in the day to support the Irish gay group Lavender and Green Alliance which will march in the parade for the first time at approximately 4 p.m.

The New York City Council is also expected to have a large contingent marching behind its banner in 2016. For the past two years the council has declined to take part in the parade in an official capacity at the direction of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito. The council's boycott was also due to the ban on Irish gay groups marching.

The decision by the parade board of directors last September to lift the decades-old, highly controversial ban on a gay Irish marching group has been more than welcome, according to Brendan Fay, the co-founder of Lavender and Green Alliance, which also hosts the annual St. Pat’s for All parade on the first Sunday of March in Sunnyside-Woodside.

Lavender and Green sent invitations to de Blasio to take part in St. Pat’s for All on March 6, and to march with the group when it sets off up Fifth Avenue for the first time on March 17.

Fay is expecting de Blasio, members of the City Council and other New York politicians to march in this year’s St. Pat’s for All parade as they always do. This year, St. Pat’s for All will feature two grand marshals, philanthropist Loretta Brennan Glucksman and novelist Colum McCann.

“We have had tremendous interest from everyone since it was announced last year that we would be marching on Fifth Avenue,” Fay told the Irish Voice. He added that Lavender and Green have also extended an invitation to march on the 17th to former Mayor David Dinkins, an ardent supporter of lifting the ban on gay groups since he was in office in the 1990s.

In 2014, de Blasio became the first New York mayor since Dinkins in 1992 to boycott the parade. Dinkins had marched in the 1991 parade with members of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) who were invited to walk behind the banner of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 7 and received a brutal reception from parade-goers, some of whom threw beer cans at Dinkins and the ILGO members.

After that, Dinkins declined to march for the remaining two years of his term because ILGO was refused a place with its own banner.

Republican mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg marched in subsequent years despite annual protests on the sidelines of Fifth Avenue by gay groups. Democrat de Blasio, however, touched off a renewed focus on the ban in 2014 when he declined to march and a number of parade sponsors subsequently withdrew financial support, including Guinness and Heineken.

In 2015, parade organizers shelved the ban on gay groups when OUT@NBCUniversal, the LGBT support group of parade broadcast network NBC, was given a place in the line of march – a move that was approved by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who agreed to serve as grand marshal for 2015.

De Blasio, however, along with the City Council, remained steadfast in refusing to march until an Irish gay group was given the green light to walk up Fifth Avenue. That happened last September when the Lavender and Green Alliance headed by Fay and Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy was finally given permission to take part in the parade, which has been under the leadership of board chairman Dr. John Lahey since last June.

The former chairman of the board’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Celebration Committee, John Dunleavy, was a strident opponent of gay groups marching in the parade, and in a Facebook post last April vowed that gay groups would “have a hard time” gaining entrance to this year’s line of march.

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2016-03-03T03:24:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/do-you-believe-in-miracles-st-patricks-parade-celebrates-end-of-25-years-of-divisionDo you believe in miracles? St. Patrick’s Parade ends 25 years of division2016-02-27T09:50:06-05:00
If Cardinal Timothy Dolan were not a prince of the church you could easily imagine him as an old fashioned Irish pol.

He’s a hands on bear of a man who greets and meets the old fashioned way.pressing a shoulder here, embracing a couple there, always a welcoming mien with the right word to say.

On Thursday night at his residence on Madison Avenue we all witnessed history and Dolan played a large part.

As Hilary Beirne, the Founding Chairman St. Patrick’s Foundation put it, after over two and a half decades of conflict the Irish have resolved their differences over the New York St. Patrick’s parade.

Co-Founder of the St. Patrick’s Parade foundation Sean Lane in gracious remarks thanked all those who had worked so hard to relieve the tensions and achieve a peaceful parade.

A parade at peace is no small achievement. There is finally an enlightened and far seeing group both running the parade and supporting it. Through their efforts they have moved the LGBT issue off the front page, granted their representatives the right to march and ended a situation that has damaged not just the parade but the Irish American community nationwide for decades.

They also picked the perfect symbolic grand marshal this year, Senator George Mitchell whose very name, as Foundation member Chris Hyland noted as he introduced the former senator, means hope, reconciliation and compromise to Irish people who recall his amazing role in bringing peace to Ireland as the American envoy there. Also praised was Parade Chairman Dr. John Lahey who has done stellar work to ensure a new era.

Mitchell spoke eloquently of the honor and what it means to him, the greatest award the Irish community in New York can offer. There was never a better year for him to receive it.

That approach has paid off as America has adjusted its previous stance against LGBT marriage and become far more inclusive all the way up to the Supreme Court ruling.

In the Cardinal’s residence on Thursday night Brendan Fay got his just reward for always approaching the issue with dignity and decency irrespective of the many taunts against him, including some from his own side for not being militant enough.

It was a truly special moment in the Irish community, to use that overworked Seamus Heaney quote where “ Hope And History rhymed”

It did on Thursday night. The bad old memories are already fading and the Irish have proven once again that given time and space and commitment they can work out the toughest of problems

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2016-02-27T07:03:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/why-has-it-taken-the-gop-so-long-to-understand-the-rise-of-donald-trumpWhy has it taken the GOP so long to understand the rise of Donald Trump?2016-02-27T07:37:12-05:00
At root they believe Trump will protect them from everyone else in the nation.

He'll protect them from the idea that gay people are their legal equals. He'll reverse the Supreme Court's same sex marriage ruling (in truth he really won't, but people are allowed to dream).

He'll protect them from ISIS. Trump has threatened to “bomb the hell” out of the Middle East. He has said his administration will “waterboard and worse” all Muslim suspects. He has said he will ban all Muslim travel to the U.S. He has said he will ensure the ones already living here are “registered” in a government database. It'll be a bit like a dog license. He'll do this because he understands that to many here they represent an unspecified “threat” that needs to be “contained.”

He'll protect them from undocumented immigrants. He has actually told them he will build a massive 2000 mile long wall to keep Latino “criminals, rapists and murderers” out. He'll be like a latter-day Noah, turning the USA into an ark as the rest of the world drowns in chaos.

He'll protect them from political correctness. They can't say they don't like black people, or gays, or Jews or the Irish now without someone raising an eyebrow at them. So Trump's rhetoric belongs to the old days when they could be as disparaging as they liked without consequence to their standing. Trump makes some white people nostalgic for a time when they could be openly bigoted and still belong.

He'll protect them from poverty. Everyone knows that both the economy and the social compact have collapsed. In America there's one set of rules for the rich and one set for everyone else. We lived in an increasingly divided nation. To some conservative white (and Latino) voters Trump looks like the aspirational avatar of American success. He's our big, bloated, be-coiffed and gold-plated golden calf. They want a piece of that success, if only in their dreams. He may not make them richer, but they’ll feel more successful just looking at him.

He’ll put them back on top of the nation’s social pyramid, because they want to be the deciders again, and they want to do what they always did – win.

Trump understands the foundational anxiety of these voters better than the GOP. He knows what they want to be is protected, not raised up. So he's become a fast talking Barnum and Bailey, he's Father Christmas, he's Daddy Warbucks, he's the Wizard of Oz, and he's leading us all a merry dance along his self-serving yellow brick road.

I don't know why it took the GOP establishment so long to understand the rise of Trump. By November of last year they should have figured out he was political teflon.

He can actually go all way to the White House on this “I’ll protect you” sales pitch. He's very close to securing the nomination already. And he got there by speaking to - and for - our worst selves and so his reign will be destructive beyond belief.

I know this because of what's he's been willing to do – and who he's been willing to sacrifice - to get there.

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2016-02-26T10:33:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/new-york-st-patricks-day-parade-formally-welcomes-irish-lgbt-marchersNew York St. Patrick’s Day Parade formally welcomes Irish LGBT marchers2016-02-25T05:23:33-05:00
New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade website described as “joyous,” parade board member Frank McGreal gave a warm welcome to the Irish gay group Lavender and Green Alliance, which will take its place in the march up Fifth Avenue for the first time this year.

The Irish LGBT organization, co-founded by Irish community activist Brendan Fay in 1994, was excluded from one of the world’s most famous marches for 25 years, and last Wednesday’s gathering in honor of Lavender and Green and officially supported by the New York City march would have been unfathomable 12 months ago. A change in the parade board’s leadership last June – the board is now led by Dr. John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University – has ushered in a new era of inclusiveness and cooperation.

Members of the Fifth Avenue parade board attended the event hosted by Consul General Barbara Jones in honor of Lavender and Green and its annual St. Pat’s for All parade in Queens. McGreal offered a warm welcome to Fay and Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy, the co-chairs of Lavender and Green, and to all the group’s members.

Fay told the Irish Voice that he expects at least 300 participants to march with the Lavender and Green Alliance on Fifth Avenue, a contingent that will include LGBT members and the Irish community leaders who have been their longtime supporters and advocates.

“It will be a historic moment and people are contacting us from around the country and even from Ireland who want to fly in and participate on the day,” Fay said.

“From March 1 on the Lavender and Green website you will be able to contact us to request to participate. We want to reach out to everyone who has been part of this movement and effort over the past 25 years.”

Lavender and Green is not planning on printing a free pass for each person who expresses an interest in marching, however. The emphasis will be placed on inviting those who have participated in their organization and efforts over the decades.

Among the well known names confirmed to march with the group on Fifth Avenue will be former grand marshals of the St. Pat’s for All parade in Sunnyside-Woodside such as Peter Quinn and Malachy McCourt. A number of New York City Council members will also stand behind the Lavender and Green banner, and, as the Irish Voice recently reported, so will New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Meanwhile, the grand marshals for the 2016 Sunnyside-Woodside parade in Queens on Sunday, March 6 are philanthropist Loretta Brennan Glucksman and best-selling Irish author Colum McCann, who both spoke at last Wednesday’s consulate event.

Brennan Glucksman reminded the gathering of just how meaningful to Irish American families and to herself personally the lifting of the ban on Irish gay marching groups on Fifth Avenue is, adding that those celebrating will include her own son and his husband.

McCann added that the ban had hurt not just gay people but their friends and family, and in that sense its lifting should be celebrated by all the Irish.

“From the podium, I looked out at the crowd of supporters old and new, and saw the entire New York Irish community represented and all of them cheering. It was a night I will never forget,” D’Arcy told the Irish Voice.

“This year the parade marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising,” McGreal said in his remarks. “In 1916, a small group of Irish men and women dared to act on their deep desire for freedom. Their vision and sacrifices created an Irish Republic that cherishes, all the children of the nation equally. We stand on their shoulders whenever Irish men and women gather to honor St. Patrick and to celebrate our shared Irish culture,” McGreal said.

He concluded his remarks by saying, “To Brendan Fay and the Lavender and Green Alliance, I say, Cead Mile Failte, one-hundred thousand welcomes.”

The evening was a reminder that Fay's long journey toward full citizenship has been Ireland's and Irish America's too. When he immigrated to America in the 1980s it was still illegal to be gay in Ireland thanks to a Victorian era law imposed by the British and retained by the new Republic.

But in the late 1980s something was already changing. America was teaching Fay, now 57, that he belonged to a distinctive and powerful community and culture, the Irish. At the same time the city's influential gay community was showing the then closeted school teacher the same inspiring lesson.

It was only when Fay and others wanted to combine and celebrate those twin identities on March 17, 1990 on Fifth Avenue that the Irish community said no, you will have to choose. You can be Irish or you could be gay, but you cannot march as both.

For Fay, a longtime Irish community activist, and for other members of the then Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO), it was as if they were being asked to participate and stay home simultaneously.

Fay did not know it at the time but that crafty Catch 22 would play itself out over 25 years.

These days, Fay, D’Arcy and their vast array of supporters couldn’t be prouder to be both Irish and gay on March 17.

“We have crossed this extraordinary threshold and people are feeling it,” Fay said. “The Irish community is feeling it. There's no going back.”

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2016-02-25T03:03:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/exclusive-de-blasio-march-lgbt-nyc-patricks-day-paradeExclusive: De Blasio to march with LGBT group in NYC Patrick's Day Parade2016-02-10T07:45:23-05:00
St. Patrick’s Day parade, the Irish Voice has learned.

The mayor, who refused to take part in the parade in prior years due to the exclusion of gay Irish groups walking behind an identifying banner, will likely march up Fifth Avenue twice on March 17. He will join a group that has yet to be determined at the front of the march – traditionally, the mayor has marched with the NYPD -- and return later in the day to support the Irish gay group Lavender and Green Alliance which will march in the parade for the first time at approximately 4 p.m.

The New York City Council is also expected to have a large contingent marching behind its banner in 2016. For the past two years the council has declined to take part in the parade in an official capacity at the direction of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito, also because Irish gay groups were barred from marching.

The decision by the parade board of directors last September to lift the decades-old, highly controversial ban on a gay Irish marching group has been more than welcome, according to Brendan Fay, the co-founder of Lavender and Green Alliance which also hosts the annual St. Pat’s for All parade on the first Sunday of March in Sunnyside-Woodside.

Lavender and Green sent invitations to de Blasio to take part in St. Pat’s for All on March 6, and to march with the group when it sets off up Fifth Avenue for the first time on March 17.

Fay is expecting de Blasio, members of the City Council and other New York politicians to march in this year’s St. Pat’s for All parade as they always do. This year, St. Pat’s for All will feature two grand marshals, philanthropist Loretta Brennan Glucksman and novelist Colum McCann.

“We have had tremendous interest from everyone since it was announced last year that we would be marching on Fifth Avenue,” Fay told the Irish Voice. He added that Lavender and Green have also extended an invitation to march on the 17th to former Mayor David Dinkins, an ardent supporter of lifting the ban on gay groups since he was in office in the 1990s.

A spokesperson for de Blasio’s office would not comment on Tuesday afternoon, saying the mayor’s parade plans would be released closer to March 17. A parade spokesperson also said plans have not been finalized and declined comment, and Fay said he hasn’t received word from the mayor’s office.

In 2014, de Blasio became the first New York mayor since Dinkins in 1992 to boycott the parade. Dinkins had marched in the 1991 parade with members of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) who were invited to walk behind the banner of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 7 and received a brutal reception from parade-goers, some of whom threw beer cans at Dinkins and the ILGO members.

After that, Dinkins declined to march for the remaining two years of his term because ILGO was refused a place with its own banner.

Republican mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg marched in subsequent years despite annual protests on the sidelines of Fifth Avenue by gay groups. Democrat de Blasio, however, touched off a renewed focus on the ban in 2014 when he declined to march and a number of parade sponsors subsequently withdrew financial support, including Guinness and Heineken.

In 2015, parade organizers shelved the ban on gay groups when OUT@NBCUniversal, the LGBT support group of parade broadcast network NBC, was given a place in the line of march – a move that was approved by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who agreed to serve as grand marshal for 2015.

De Blasio, however, along with the City Council, remained steadfast in refusing to march until an Irish gay group was given the green light to walk up Fifth Avenue. That happened last September when the Lavender and Green Alliance headed by Fay and Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy was finally given permission to take part in the parade which since last June has been under the leadership of board chairman Dr. John Lahey.

The former chairman of the board’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Celebration Committee, John Dunleavy, was a strident opponent of gay marching groups, and in a Facebook post last April vowed that gay groups would “have a hard time” gaining entrance to this year’s line of march.

This week a Belfast court will finally hear a legal appeal over the ruling.

Clearly Ashers owners Colin McArthur and his wife Karen are going to pursue their so-called ‘gay cake scrap’ to the predictably bitter end. Only now it’s not so much a scrap as a rainbow frosted death match.

For a company that excels at crafting sweet buns, there’s a surprisingly sour aftertaste to this on-the-surface rather clear-cut tale of point counterpoint.

Christians are scripturally called upon to lead by example, but this scripturally inspired cake company has taken a distinctly 2016 approach to the sharing of the Good News, by lawyering up instead.

In fact the conspicuously Christian bakers have just called in the biggest of big guns. Professor Christopher McCrudden of Queen's University, one of Northern Ireland's top legal experts, will join them in court on Wednesday. McCrudden has been enlisted for the team led by David Scoffield, Queens Counsel.

A Professor of Human Rights and Equality Law at Queen's and the William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School, he was Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He studied law at Queen's, Yale University and Oxford University.

Now he’s in a bun fight over gay rights. If you live long enough you really do get to see everything.

The premise driving the conflict is increasingly bitter and scattershot on both sides. Ashers claims they are being forced to compromise their Christian principles and “endorse” a message that their faith rejects.

But gay activists counter that Ashers is not being asked for an endorsement or a blessing at all, instead they are simply being asked to decorate a cake for another paying customer in the manner he chooses. The message on the cake is the gay rights group’s, and no one else’s.

Certainly the growing standoff has hit a nerve. Last March, before the ruling, Belfast’s Waterfront Hall was filled to capacity, in fact it was literally overwhelmed, when thousands of evangelical Christians turned up, anxious to protect their Biblically ordained right to refuse to decorate gay people’s celebration cakes.

They could have been ministering to the poor and the sick, they could have been sheltering the homeless, or even have been praying for peace. Instead they were fighting over two Sesame Street characters on a frosted confection.

What Our Lord would make of where his flock have found themselves now, or rather where they have pitched their battle tents, no one knows. To the outside world the standoff looks irritating or absurd.

From the outside it looks like an evenly matched battle between an immovable object (evangelicals) and an unstoppable force (gay rights), but that impression would be wholly incorrect.

In the biblical parlance that Colin McArthur and his wife Karen might appreciate, it’s actually a David and Goliath struggle and in this case they’re Goliath.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that has not passed a law to introduce same-sex marriage. This is a direct consequence the theocratic mindset of fundamentalist Christians within the wider unionist parties.

One such group is the Christian Institute, which raced to offer the McArthurs their advice, political support and legal assistance.

The current law in Northern Ireland supports Colin and Karen’s marriage and denies all gay people the same legal courtesy. There is no equality. Indeed, the unionist political parties that have lent their support to the scrap are alone in the UK and the wider island of Ireland in their vehement opposition to gay equality.

Many of the Christian groups supporting Ashers have requested a so-called “conscience clause” be introduced into Northern Ireland’s equality legislation. But this is just a thinly veiled attempt to copper fasten or roll back advances made by the gay community. In practice it will be the cooties clause and its target will be gays.

Veteran gay rights leaders have bigger buns to bake, however. This week longtime LGBT activist Peter Tatchell surprised many when, writing in The Guardian, he reversed course and decided that Ashers should be allowed to refuse service to gay customers.

Surprising many, Tatchell wrote that “the finding of political discrimination against Gareth Lee, the man who ordered the “Support Gay Marriage” cake sets a worrying precedent.”

Tatchell continued: “This raises the question: should Muslim printers be obliged to publish cartoons of Mohammed? Or Jewish ones publish the words of a Holocaust denier? Or gay bakers accept orders for cakes with homophobic slurs? If the Ashers verdict stands it could, for example, encourage far-right extremists to demand that bakeries and other service providers facilitate the promotion of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim opinions. It would leave businesses unable to refuse to decorate cakes or print posters with bigoted messages.

“In my view, it is an infringement of freedom to require businesses to aid the promotion of ideas to which they conscientiously object. Discrimination against people should be unlawful, but not against ideas.”

So there you have it. It’s not a wee bun it’s a Pandora’s box. And the best thing to do with those, history teaches, is leave them unopened.

Ashers may well win the next round. But the truth is that just like the Irish peace process, there can actually be no winners in this unseemly cake scrap, which is so placid on the surface and so intolerant underneath, until both sides learn to live and let live.

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2016-02-04T03:09:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/news/history-as-ny-parade-allows-two-gay-groups-names-mitchellHistory as NY Parade allows two gay groups, names Mitchell2016-01-12T04:22:14-05:00
St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee naming of the 2016 Grand Marshal at the New York Athletic Club, on Monday night.

Chairman of the Board Dr. John Lahey, President of Quinnipiac University, introduced the Grand Marshal, the Irish peace process architect Senator George Mitchell. But just as importantly he made clear the 2016 parade would be the most inclusive in history with the Lavender and Green Alliance joining the NBC gay group OUT@NBCUniversal.

Lavender and Green’s founder Brendan Fay could barely hide his excitement and joy at the turn of events. Barred from the parade every year except in 1991, when they were almost driven off Fifth Avenue by vicious abuse, now they are welcome participants. Fay has worked diligently every year since, including starting a St. Patrick's For All parade in Queens to set the stage for acceptance, which was long overdue.

“This is a great day,” Fay stated. “Now we are recognized as an Irish group, no more discrimination with the same opportunity to march as everyone else.”

Senator George Mitchell is clearly an inspired choice. He delivered a dazzling and self-effacing speech, poking fun at those who have practically sanctified him for helping finish violence in Northern Ireland.

The choice of Mitchell was an inspired one, especially in such a controversial year for the parade when a rump of disaffected hardliners still resent the parade ever being opened up. John Dunleavy, the architect of that policy, was nowhere to be seen, a strange absence on a stage he once controlled with an iron grip.

Mitchell is the greatest symbolic counterweight to all that, a man who took what looked like an impossible job in Northern Ireland and made them feel part of a peaceful, powerful movement.

Mitchell spoke emotionally about his parents, poor as church mice, his mother with no English having immigrated from Lebanon, his father raised in an orphanage. I only wished anti-immigration advocates could have been there to hear him.

Chairman of the Board John Lahey should be thanked also, as he coolly and calmly maneuvered through the hardliners and has emerged with the best, most inclusive parade in memory in 2016, on the 100th anniversary of Ireland’s Easter Uprising.

Cardinal Dolan also attended and gave his blessing to the parade, perfectly aware of the controversy surrounding it. It's a bold and inclusive move by the cardinal who doubtless saw irremediable damage to his beloved parade unless a solution was found.

As Master of Ceremonies Hilary Beirne noted, the parade had survived the original battle against the British, the Civil War, two World Wars and attempts to tear it apart from the inside.

It has emerged now at its strongest with a dedicated and enlightened board who deserve every credit for their work in ensuring the greatest parade of all continues as a symbolic reminder of what we Irish went through before we were accepted in America.

Senator George Mitchell to lead 2016 NYC St Patrick's Day Parade

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2016-01-12T03:56:00-05:00http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/bill-oreillys-war-on-christianity-is-an-unseemly-tantrumBill O’Reilly’s “war on christianity” is an unseemly tantrum2016-01-05T03:26:13-05:00
There are many challenges facing the nation in 2016, but a pogrom targeting Christians is not – and never has been – one of them.

It has long become clear that what pugnacious pundit O’Reilly mistakenly calls the “war on Christianity/Christmas/Christians” is really just another tantrum that elderly white conservative males like himself don’t get to call all the shots in America these days, the way they always used to.

“If you are a Christian or a white man in the USA, it's open season on you,” he huffed.

Warming to this idiocy O’Reilly’s pal Rick Santorum agreed saying: “The treatment of Christians is so bad we should keep in mind Nazi Germany... where you go from Christians – Jews, obviously, but also Christians – being not just persecuted but put to death.”

Apparently they both think they’re just days away from the gas chambers. Who is building these fictitious gulags, Bill Maher?

You can see why they’re panicking. O’Reilly thinks that conservative supremacy should be the national status quo – and increasingly, it’s not. So he and his fellow conservatives desperately want all of the political power back and to get it back they’ve concocted this epic bait and switch: when they say Christianity they mean Conservatism.

Telling the comfortable that they’re really being persecuted is all he’s left with. It’s a dangerous game. Placing Jesus at the front of your political party has been tried before with disastrous results.

The truth is seventy percent of the United States identify as Christian, every president ever elected here has been a Christian, seventy eight percent of our governors are Christian and eighty percent of our Congress is Christian.

Set yourself the challenge of finding a major Democratic politician who has maligned Christianity and you’ll fail. If this is a war against Christianity then someone forget to inform the liberals.

The sheer hucksterism of terrifying Fox News’ elderly viewers into thinking their world is about to end is just another way to raise funds for Republican causes. Tell them they’re fighting for Jesus instead of Ted Cruz and they’re more likely to part with their hard earned cash, after all.

But attacks against American Christians over their faith is almost non-existent in the United States. Attacks on Muslims, Jews and people of other faith traditions are much more frequent (and often much more violent) however.

Anti-gay violence is actually the second most commonly occurring type of hate crime committed in the United States (when will we see O’Reilly run a campaign to address that?). Race is the number one reason (when will we see an O’Reilly special on that epidemic?)

And of course there are precisely zero incidents of gays attacking Christians recorded by the FBI.

So crying that you’re being attacked when the statistics prove just the opposite isn’t just mendacious, it’s reprehensible.

The war that O’Reilly is fighting is just a propaganda war. The “threats” he sees all around him exist only in his imagination and nowhere else. Not being able to persecute gays isn’t really a defeat; not being the only faith tradition on the national stage isn’t a crisis.

If fewer and fewer young people here describe themselves as Christians then perhaps Christians should reflect on why they’re increasingly disillusioned, rather than look for easy scapegoats among liberals and gays.

The advertisement is one of several images that the party is considering as part of its election campaign, a senior Labour source has revealed.

The election ad is aimed at fueling fears over the possibility of a Sinn Fein/Fianna Fail government and presents the Coalition as the only alternative, the Irish Independent reports.

The attack ad has raised concerns over the potential for a US-style negative election campaign with parties engaged in cut-throat tactics in an effort to win votes.

The Labour ad comes after previous revelations that Fine Gael has plans to personally target Michael Martin during the election, having described him as “a shiver without a spine” in a private briefing.

The advertisement shows Adams and Martin as a agy couple outside Leinster House cutting a wedding cake, surrounded by left-wing TDs Richard Boyd Barrett, Paul Murphy, Mick Wallace and Clare Daly as the wedding party. The ad warns voters that “This is one marriage we should vote NO to this year.” At the bottom are the words: “Vote Labour for a stable and balanced Government.”

The source said that the goal of the draft advert was to “make a serious point in a humorous way.”

However reaction on social media has been overwhelmingly negative with many believing the ad has a homophobic tinge to it.

According to the Irish Independenthe ad will likely infuriate Fianna Fail’s Martin, who has persistently ruled out a coalition with Sinn Fein, despite advances from Adams, who is open to forming a government with the other party.

A spokeswoman for Micheál Martin said the ad showed that Joan Burton's party was "clutching at straws in desperation.”

"The stakes are very high for Labour, so they have to go for the negative campaign to get noticed," she added.

Fianna Fail's environment spokesman, Barry Cowen, said that any follow-up to Labour's 'Every little hurts under Fine Gael' ad would only "heighten people's abhorrence of their tactics.”

A Sinn Fein spokesman has said Labour was becoming "increasingly desperate" ahead of the election.Campaign efforts should accelerate in the coming weeks as it is speculated that Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny will hold the election on February 25 or 26.

Labour’s gay marriage ad, one of many that the party plans to unveil over the course of the campaign, is currently a draft and has not yet been commissioned to appear in any publication.